For many events professionals, design and branding elements aren't exactly afterthoughts, but they are considered secondary to priorities like attracting the right attendees and developing compelling content. If the website is professional-looking and the company logo is used consistently on invitations, that's often considered sufficient. After all, you can't quantify the impact of design on event outcomes, right??

Actually, you can. At Splash, we recently analyzed the highest-performing virtual and in-person event websites from August 2019 to August 2020, using 37 design-related metrics. It turns out that successful meetings share some specific design principles. In an environment currently dominated by virtual events ¡ª where site design and branding are on full display for the duration of the event ¡ª emulating these best practices can help you host better-attended and better-received gatherings.?

Below are four elements that can help you maximize registrations and check-ins, communicate your main points clearly and scale well-designed events.?

Encourage Engagement Action Early?

An event website's first job is to drive registrations. Eye-catching visuals, headlines that pique readers' interest and content that clearly communicates what to expect are all intended to get the right people to sign up for your event ¨C and it¡¯s important to enable attendees to do so as early as possible.

Be sure to place registration buttons in the first block of content and keep all sign-up forms in line with the page, rather than linking out to a separate page. On successful virtual event pages, first-time invitees encountered a registration button in the first content block 77 percent of the time. Successful virtual events also used in-line forms 23 percent of the time, which was almost three times more common than in-person events.?

Give Your Titles Center Stage?

For virtual event websites, page layout isn't simply a matter of aesthetics. It also creates a visual hierarchy that helps users differentiate between well-defined levels of information and navigate their experience in a cohesive way. Titles and headlines play an important role in this process. Therefore, they should be the most prominent text elements on the website and be used to communicate the most valuable information.

The font-size ratio for titles to body copy should be somewhere between 2.5 to 1 and 3.5 to 1. Of the most successful events we analyzed, the median event title size was 2.8 rems and the median body copy size was 1 rem. This creates an effective size contrast and facilitates more streamlined information delivery.?

Keep Content Concise?

The event website content should convey the most important details of the meeting in the most straightforward way possible. In other words, less is more.

Our analysis showed that the best virtual event pages had an average of 5.8 content blocks or sections, compared to 7.2 for in-person events. No more than six content blocks per virtual event page should be your target.

Aim for High-Contrast Colors

White backgrounds are strongly correlated with high performance for digital meetings. Almost 89 percent of the successful virtual event pages and 77 percent of successful in-person event pages used primarily white backgrounds with black or dark-grey body copy. Additionally, registration buttons that strongly contrast with the background but are distinct from headlines and text are optimal for encouraging sign ups and providing an accessible visual experience.

Eric Holmen is the chief revenue officer of Splash, a next-generation event marketing platform designed to help teams build and host virtual, in-person and hybrid meetings. He is an expert in marketing technology and digitally enabled engagement, having held leadership positions in several experience technology companies. In his two-decade marketing career, Holmen has managed and led all aspects of events, from executing and hosting to implementing enterprise-level event tech platforms, leading to his current role driving growth and sales for Splash.?