Evidence-Based Website Secrets

If you have the technical chops and the inclination, there are several website builders that permit you to build your own website. Here’s a good list.

Choosing a designer

Once you’ve decided on a platform, you should limit your choice of designers to those with significant expertise designing websites on that platform. If you are using WordPress or Webflow, there are thousands of designers available worldwide.

If you are on a tight budget but still need the expertise of a designer, look for one who uses templates or themes. Typical prices range from $2,000-$5,000.

If you have a larger budget and can hire an agency, you will get a website customized for you, with a team consisting of a project manager, creative director, graphic designer, developmental designer and content writer. The agency will map your sitemap architecture and focus on making navigation of the website flow naturally. It will pay special attention to the “call to action,” so viewers can easily reach you to schedule a meeting.

The agency should also be able to produce video for your website, featuring the partners in your firm, and showing them in a warm and relatable manner.

The cost of this level of design depends on many factors, including how many uniquely designed landing pages you require, how many blogs you will be migrating to the new website, whether you require extensive animation and whether you opt for video. A general range is $15,000-$30,000 (which is also representative of the costs charged by my firm).

Here’s a hidden trap.

Designers are great at design. Often, they know little about the advisory business. It’s not realistic to expect them to draft website content without an extensive learning curve. For this reason, sophisticated advisors retain writers who understand your business to work with designers, assuming the designers lack this knowledge.

Evidence-based design

Most advisors understand evidence-based investing, but they draw a blank when I ask if they are familiar with evidence-based website design.

Here’s a critical question you should ask a designer you are thinking about hiring: How familiar are you with the laws of UX?

“UX” refers to “user experience design.” Its focus is on the experience of the user who visits your website.

The goal of good UX design is a website that “delights users” and reduces “pain points” they may encounter as they engage with your website.

UX designers are familiar with key UX principles. They understand UX design methods and processes. They have taken UX design courses. They have extensive experience implementing UX design.

To probe deeper, ask your designer to explain “Hick’s law” or “goal gradient effects.”

That’s the UX equivalent to asking you to explain standard deviation.

If they can’t answer those (or similar) questions, they aren’t familiar with basic principles of UX design.

You can read about all these principles here.

The overriding problem with making judgments about design is akin to the behavior finance issues you confront in your practice. There’s a tendency to make these decisions emotionally and not objectively.

A website might be visually appealing, but unless it’s grounded in sound UX design, you’re likely to be disappointed.

UX design is the evidence-based secret many design firms hope you won’t consider because they aren’t schooled in it.

Dan trains executives and employees in the lessons based on the research on his latest book, Ask: How to Relate to Anyone. His online course, Ask: Increase Your Sales. Deepen Your Relationships, is currently available.

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