I just read that. Unskilled/skilled sounds really pretentious. Sorry about that. Just want to point out there is a trap there that you can fall into if you don’t know about it in advance.

I am not a designer. I’m actually awful at design. Way below average. A few things I have picked up though that help me work with designers & managing design process.

The most important is this: Emphasis is relative, not absolute. You cannot emphasise everything. You cannot emphasise a’ without de emphasising b’.

That’s not a full story, but it’s not far. It is possible to increase the ‘total’ amount of attention a page commands. You can represent that ‘attention’ as “time on page” or “bounce rate” or “retention rates” (go measure that google) or whatever jumble of metrics want. But, to the unskilled, it’s not worth chasing that. You are too likely to do damage rather then good. Even to the skilled it’s a low return undertaking.

Having items on a page that compete for attention tends to create noise which reduces total attention. There are tricks for doing better then average like taking into account the order which elements are noticed and read and creating flow. But most attempts will fail.

The lowest hanging fruit is working out what is important, numbering it & creating a design (or in my case sending the number to a designer) based on that. Other then that, you may also need to send a ‘this site is a…’ message.