We’ve all been there.
A button on our site that leads to all sorts of awesomeness, dormant and unclicked.
How do you spice it up? Iconography, my friend. And good iconography at that.
First, the free option: FontAwesome. FontAwesome is a font filled with icons (think Dingbats or Wingdings). In this case, all the icons correspond to a vector image that can scale indefinitely large or small, and the whole set is paired with a JavaScript toolkit to help you use them more easily. In fact, many WordPress themes come bundled with the latest FontAwesome set:
The best part? FontAwesome is 100% absolutely, totally free. You just have to be able to figure out how to use it (or have a theme that comes bundled).
Next up, the kinda-free option: The Noun Project.
I’m a big fan of The Noun Project. They have some seriously cool icons you can download for free and almost all of them are licensed under Creative Commons – meaning you can use them for free as long as you attribute the author. You can also pay per icon or monthly starting at $10/mo for 10 no-attribution-needed downloads. The fees go to support the artists to make more icons. Better still, if you’re artistically inclined, you can make your own set of icons and sell them straight from the site. How cool is that?
OK, so I’ve got some icons, now what?
A lonely little button that doesn’t get any clicks will be a slightly-fancier lonely little button that doesn’t get any clicks if you just throw an icon on it. You want to guide the user’s path through your site using iconography – make it crystal clear what you want them to do next, what you want them to click on next, what you want them to pay attention to.
It’s not just about the fact that you have an icon, but that you have the right icon in use that makes sense to the context of the action you are hoping the user takes.
- Moving on to the next step? An arrow might be worthy.
- Want the user to pay you? Maybe a dollar sign (if you want to remind the user about money – though this can backfire)
- Want the user to read something? A book, exclamation mark, or warning sign (depending on what the material is)
In short, a free (or almost-free) icon might not be a cure-all for your conversion woes, but it can certainly help!
This post is part of the Word Carnival series. Every month, a whole cadre of awesome business professionals get together to talk best practices. Everybody and their mom claims to have the magic panacea that will suddenly jump you from living out of a cardboard box to a six figure income, laughing from the penthouse suite as you throw coins over your balcony – not for the morbid fun of it, but just so you can feel something – anything – again. Anyway, here’s a lineup of the Word Carnival business experts favorite tools – all for under $10. No panaceas, just great tools that work well.