Hick’s Law is a popular theory that’s cited by a variety of individuals for different purposes, but is frequently referenced in terms of web design. In other words, by increasing the number of choices, the decision time is also increased.

When applying Hick’s Law to your website, it’s important for you to know which actions are the most important for your bottom line. For example, do you want users to opt-in for your lead magnet, or do you want them to put a product in their shopping cart? Every page on your site should achieve one main objective.

The more you can limit your user’s choices, the easier your website will be to use, and your conversions will skyrocket.

The Rule of Thirds is a popular photography principle that can also be applied to web design. With the Rule of Thirds, you’re supposed to visually divide an image (or website page) into thirds (both vertically and horizontally).

This gives you nine equal squares:

According to the rule, the four middle intersections are strategic places of interest. When objects are placed at these points, it creates the most impactful image or design.

In terms of web design, you can place the page’s most important elements at these intersections to get people focused on them, boosting your conversions.

(Or rather, impatience.) It turns out that people are incredibly impatient, particularly when it comes to surfing the web.

A mere one second delay in page load time results in a 7% reduction in conversions!

So when it comes to page loading speed, every second counts. 

In web design, whitespace is often referred to as negative space. Positive space is the space that contains all the elements on your site, whereas negative space is all of the empty space in between.

Despite the name, negative space is actually a positive thing in web design, because without it your website would be unreadable and unusable.

Similar to Hick’s Law is the fact that people can only handle so much information at one time. Visually, if we see too much stuff all crammed into one page, we get overwhelmed and it bothers us. Creating a great user experience on your website means getting rid of anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to the design.

The general rule of thumb is that you have a mere 8 seconds to get a visitor’s attention, because that is the length of the human attention span. (Yes, it’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish!)

You only have a very tiny window of opportunity to engage a user when they first land on your site, so make those seconds count!

• Use a large, benefit-driven headline that is brief and to the point.
• Use eye-catching imagery that conveys the main point or purpose of your page and draws the eye towards your main call to action.
• Make signup buttons large, simple and clear.
• Use power words to make your copy more enticing and engaging.
• Incorporate multimedia such as video, audio, or other interactive content.
• Use hover effects on your buttons (e.g. make them change color on mouse-over) to make them more satisfying to click.

People love human faces. When we see a face, we are automatically triggered to feel something or to empathize with that person. 

If there’s one thing that can really drag down the quality of a blog post or piece of content, it’s low quality images.

If you want more conversions, use the best images you can get a hold of!