When planning a new website, it’s understandable to want to concentrate on the site aesthetics or fun parts of the project such as the colors and layout. While these are important aspects of site design, they likely shouldn’t be your starting point. In fact, a qualified web designer can help you with both aesthetics and functional areas of a website.
Ideally, your business’ web presence should be designed with the ultimate goal of bringing in targeted new business. To meet this objective, you’ll want to address these three key points in your website design.
Communicate Your Brand, Your Voice
Successful business know that they need to invest time and other resources into continually building their brand. This branding should be carried throughout the website design and copy.
The demographics and needs of your particular audience should be considered and will influence your site design. Is your audience tech savvy pre-teens or tech-challenged older adults? These factors not only impact your brand and message but your entire website design and aesthetics.
Fresh and Engaging Content
Not only is fresh and engaging content critical to ensure a positive user experience, but it is also a ranking factor with the search engines. If your website is stale, rarely having new content added, it likely won’t be given or maintain high search engine rankings which should be one of your goals.
Content on your website should seek to both build your brand and provide valuable information to readers. Your posts, or new pages, should have the goal of establishing you or your business as an authoritative, current resource in your field.
Not sure where to start? Simply ask yourself what questions typical clients would have and then answer those questions in written content, graphics, videos, and other mediums on your site. You’ll also want to share this content on social media and email to gain additional exposure.
Clear Calls to Action
In the end, you’re building a website to gain new clients and sell products. If visitors to your site don’t know what you want them to do, you’re wasting your time. This is where your calls to action become so valuable. Do you want visitors to call you to schedule an appointment? If so, don’t make them search your website for your phone number! Make it easy on the user.
A call to action should fit well within your site design and also be appropriate to the content. Having pop-ups all over your website could just annoy and drive people away. Instead, a site should provide contact information in a visually appealing way. Also, adding industry white papers, graphics with offers, and forms to register for a free consultation can be effective methods of achieving conversions.
Websites Need Ongoing Work
It’s easy to get lost in the latest design trends and bells and whistles and think about how nice it will be when its ‘done’. But if you fail to have a detailed plan for your Website and being committed to it, the end result is not likely to realize its potential.
In designing a website, you’ll want to have a plan in place, build towards what you want to achieve and continuously evaluate your goals to ensure that those are being addressed appropriately.
