I just recently completed another redesign with outstanding results, so I thought it would be a good time not only to talk about how important good design is but to show some real-world stats on what kind of ROI I’m talking about.

Post-Redesign Metrics

The first stat that was important to me was Visits per Registration — that is, how many visits did it take for the site to get a user to register.  You can see from this graph that the ratio sometimes approached 400 visits for 1 registration before the redesign rolled out in late March.  Then it suddenly plummeted below 100 before leveling off around the 110 range — a huge improvement.

Conversions per Week was the other stat that was critical.  A conversion is worth quite a bit for this site, so I wanted to know just how much the redesign was able to move the needle.  You can see that the change was significant and immediate.  The site went from averaging less than 20 per week to more than 40.

Total ROI

I spent well less than $2,000 on 99designs and have so far reaped improvements approaching $100,000.  Nothing else changed other than the design, so that’s a 5,000% ROI — and it gets better every day.

There are few things that will give you a better ROI than giving an ugly site a good facelift.

I can’t tell you how many sites I see wearing a whore’s uniform — selling themselves out for a quick AdSense click, not realizing that they’re sacrificing greater long-term benefit.

Take a good, honest look at your site and ask yourself two questions:

1. What is the visitor most likely to do when they get there?
2. Is that what you want them to do?

Take a look at this page, for example. Hopefully you can see that it’s designed to maximize the number of clicks on the AdSense unit. His model to is to attract free traffic from search engines and then send that traffic elsewhere via AdSense. And that’s a model that works great for him.

It’s probably not the model that will work best for you, though. AdSense is a terrible revenue source. It’s great to get you going, but most long-term models need something much more than the slim return from AdSense. Yet, how many sites do you see every day that are so heavily laden with AdSense that they lose visitors before they’ve really had time to turn them into customers (or subscribers, or whatever the actual goal of your site is)?

Is the design of your site encouraging the behavior that you want to encourage, or are you sending all the wrong signals?

One of the easiest ways to do that is with logos, and there are two categories of logos that help your visitors to trust you.

The first type is seals from companies like VeriSign, TRUSTe, Better Business Bureau and Hacker Safe. These companies certify different aspects of your business to assure your visitors that you can be trusted.

The second type is logos of sites who have mentioned yours in some way. When you include these logos under a header like “Featured On” or “As Seen On,” visitors see these as endorsements of your site — and the more prominent the endorser, the more trust is conveyed.

And in most cases, the simple presence of the logo is all that matters. I’ve seen conversion rates jump 30% with just one good logo, and surprisingly virtually no one follows the link to see what they actually said about you.

Getting several certifications could cost you a few thousand every year, but if you’re making $5,000 a month and can increase your conversion rate by 30% or more, that investment returns itself many times over.