What is the most important information?
You only have a few seconds to capture the user's attention. If you can't answer their question or concern right off the bat, you've probably lost them! Because of this, I focused on information architecture from the very beginning.
I wanted to get people excited about the thought of coming out, so every page had a video header that gave them an idea of what it would feel like.
Different, Better, Special
Since UMC was far away, we needed to take the chance to really sell why UMC was different, better, and special than other event venues.
Pricing was a big point of concern for potential customers, so we moved it higher on the page. This showed that UMC was upfront and transparent about what they offered.
Some designers may put the CTA at the top, but I felt that it was necessary to first tell a story and help people see and feel what it would be like to celebrate or compete at UMC.
Lastly we needed the rules side of coming to UMC, this helped people come prepared for a smooth and seamless experience.
Why is the website taking 12 second to load?
The total load time of the website was over 12 seconds...per page! Research shows that each second it takes for your website to load decreases your conversion rates by up to 10%.
After running a background diagnostic check I realized each one of the images on the site was full-sized. 30% of the load was dedicated to just images.
To fix this, I implemented lazy load and used compressed image size.
A whopping 40% of the load time was dedicated to various tracking codes like Google Analytics, Facebook, and Instagram. While getting accurate data is important, it should not be the first thing loading on each page.
By working with development I was able to take the code for each tracking instance and move it to the bottom of each page, drastically reducing our overall load time.
Is Mobile or Desktop More Important?
The majority of visitors were on mobile, and since the website was not mobile-friendly, most people had a terrible user experience.
I used a mobile-first approach, shorter paragraphs of text, and accessible CTAs that were easy to press. Because of this, we saw most mobile users were able to find what they were looking for on the website, and UMC saw higher conversion rates.
