Elle Magazine: how to get more visits and engage users with the design

Elle Portugal Magazine entrusted Grow Under the reformulation of its website´s Web Design to get more visits and reduce the Bounce Rate, in a partnership with Web Concept.

The Web Design reformulation of Elle Portugal's page came up in the context of a need to get more visits to the website, and to promote a bigger users engagement, causing them to interact more actively with the content.

It was important to proceed to some modifications in the website´s format in order to "bind" the users for longer.

The challenge of redesigning Elle's website

To boost the website's numbers in terms of visit metrics, the bet was in a design with a different dynamic  in order to promote an approximation to the users, and to guarantee that they faced the website's most interesting content.

Thus, there was a reduction of the Menu's and Logo's spaces, at the top of the website, which allowed to increase the number of articles shown in the first page, expanding the main showcase of contents available to users.

We also proceeded to the main highlight reduction, which comes up in a slideshow, in order to fit in a 15'6 inch screen, including image and text clearly visible, and all at once.

Once it is a website with a strong visual component, which is typicallly the case in the fashion and lifestyle area where Elle moves itself, the strategy went by to reinforce this aspect, namely increasing the thumbnails size (the article’s reduced pictures that come up in the first page). This way, the website became more appealing.

It was still created a side menu with new categories, including one exclusively dedicated to Videos, which allows a better organization of the content, as well as additional options to get the users attention. Now, the website has several sections that arise immediately available on the menu, providing more information to users, and increasing the range of possibilities for those who visit Elle's website.

Improve usability with colours and fonts

To promote a better reading of the page content, Grow Under gave more consistency to the website's design, namely by concentrating itself in the improvement of the colour palette used.

Colour is an essential component in a website's construction once the different existing tones raise different kinds of emotions in people. In this case the goal was to create a greater empathy with Elle Portugal's page visitors, and at the same time, to promote an easier access to the relevant content.

This way there was also redefinitions in terms of text space and lettering with the care of defining fonts and letter sizes that allow to increase the website's accessibility.

The accessibility issue is much more than just to create pages for people with disabilities. It is about meeting Internet universality principle, creating easy to use pages by all - which ensures from the start a broader audience.

To reinforce the effectiveness of the more dynamic new design it was also suggested to Elle's journalists the daily publication of a greater number of articles - once the main information vehicle of the magazine is still the printed version. At the same time, the possibility of notifications´ subscription was added to the page in order to maintain the users on constant alert about new interesting content.

Immediate success

The reformulations carried out had positive effects almost immediately after their implementation.

Visits increased and the Bounce Rate dropped from about 80% to 45%, which means that now those who visit the website, don´t leave it immediately. The Bounce Rate is the total percentage of users that leave a website on the same page where they got in, being a good indicator to measure the users engagement with a certain web page.

The restructuration of Elle's website web design allowed to substantially increase the reading average time and the pages per session, data that reflects that users feel more engaged and that they arrive to content they consider worth reading.

Along with updating the design, the website has been completed daily with more frequent content, which has also contributed to increase substantially the visits.

But the work is not done. Among the next steps to take, there is the website stats analysis, in terms of accesses, to get useful info to pursue the path of success, namely to increase the publicity sales.

Carrying out a customer satisfaction survey is an effective way to ascertain the problems and the solutions that still may be implemented.

Another step of the path goes through the optimization of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a process that is never really completed, once Google is always changing the searches algorithms.