The Business Benefits Of Excellent Web Design And Web Development
You’ve Got Your Brand Design, What’s Next?
What’s next is making sure that the feel of your newly designed brand is translated to the web design you are planning. Ideally, if you’ve used an experienced branding agency they may have the expertise to help with this next stage.
Doing business requires an online presence and a successful online offering requires an experienced web designer and web developer. You must think of your website as a staff member. A client-facing representative. Your customer’s first impressions count. Because a positive first impression will translate into profits.
Think Of Your Website As A Friend
Who is this representative? Are they friendly? Happy? Easy to get on with? Are they knowledgeable about your services and products? Easy to find and talk to? It may help to write a description based on a friend that has the characteristics you’d like your website to reflect.
A talented web designer will help you communicate all these characteristics and turn them into a website design. Typography, colour, layout, images, ease of use, and the hierarchy of information. All these things must be considered. No detail should be too small.
A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.
Jakob Nielsen
The Benefits Of A Content Management System
I would recommend using WordPress for your website. It’s well supported and widely used by many businesses and offered by most web hosting providers. This makes it relatively easy to transfer if you move your site in the future. WordPress is also easy to manage and update in the admin area at the back of the site.
Many companies specialise in building bespoke WordPress websites. This may cost you a tad more than a premade theme. But this will pay dividends as your business grows. And will make your website unique to your company and its values.
What A Successful Website Should Be…
Your website should be several things.
Easy to navigate. Why make it challenging for customers to find what they need? Easy, clear navigation is the key. Don’t use fancy business lingo in your navigation or content. Call it things what they are in plain language everyone can understand.
Pleasant experience. You wouldn’t want to browse in a shop that was confused, dirty and dimly lit. That has bargain bins you have to rummage around in order to find what you want. Make your user experience a continuous brand experience. Does it all feel part of the same brand? Or is it a touch schizophrenic? This also holds true for the tone of voice of your brand. Is that also consistent throughout your site? Are you using the same words to describe the same thing consistently?
Your Website Should Also Be…
Hierarchy of information. Make it obvious what’s important and what’s not. Use your H1 – H6 headings wisely. Ensure your web pages have plenty of white space. This gives the information important breathing room and adds a feeling of quality. Subheads, bold text, bulleted lists, short paragraphs and sentences. They all add to the overall impression that it’s easy to read and clear.
Also, I’ll let you into a small secret here. Not everyone reads all the body copy. People are five times more likely just to read your headline. So it’s good to have subheads to indicate what the copy is about. Especially if someone is looking for specific information, they might just skip ahead and read the bit that interests them.
Your website is the window of your business. Keep it fresh, keep it exciting.
Jay Conrad Levinson
Fewer clicks to content. You are busy, I’m busy, and your customer is busy. If possible cut down on the number of clicks they will need to do to buy your products or services. Think carefully, how many clicks would you do before you got bored and went elsewhere? One, Three, Six, More?
As my old boss at Tesco once told me “let the hound see the rabbit”. This roughly translates as turning all the product labels around so the customer can see what they are buying.
Also on the topic of brevity. Make sure your copy is concise but entertaining. Again people are short on time. Keep it simple, state it clearly, and above all don’t waste your customer’s time.
How Great Web Development Will Help You Profit
Sorry, but great, clearly presented information is only half the job of a successful website. The other is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This starts with clean organised code. Your pages must have keywords, title tags, meta description, and properly optimised and labelled images (title and alt tags).
Your page content should be lightly sprinkled with your keyword and its synonyms at the beginning of the first paragraph, in your main heading, in your subheadings and throughout your content. I say lightly because a heavy hand will do the opposite and search engines won’t like this. Images should also contain keywords (if relevant) in their names, title and alt tags. Your page URL should also contain your keyword if it makes sense in this context.
As you can see SEO is something that requires thought and planning at the very early stages of web development. Too often it is tagged on as an afterthought and the content isn’t right for the keyword you are shoehorning in there. So it’s best to consider these things before writing your content.
Content is the key. Because it’s how a website creates an online experience.
Adam Audette
A Blog Will Help With SEO
Blogs are great for creating fresh content on your site. Search engines and customers love new content. Try and post as often as you can, and try to keep it consistent. It’s best to appoint someone to take responsibility for this. Maybe you could hold regular team meetings and tackle articles as a group. If articles are written by several people you may need a brand tone of voice manual.
Ask Yourself Are All Those Fancy Plugins Necessary?
Web development also involves determining if a feature is necessary. If so, do we use a plugin to achieve this? Or is it something that can be custom coded? Coding something bespoke usually uses less code. And is preferable to use a plugin that may contain code and features you don’t need.
Less code and compressed code achieve quicker page download speeds. Google loves quick download speeds. If Google has a choice of two websites with the same information but one downloads quicker. Which one do you think it’ll rank higher?
Optimised Website. Happy Customer
SEO and page speed optimisation has the added benefit of making a website a better user experience for your customers. So it’s worth doing this well and paying for professionals. Thanks for reading.
Photo by Shannon Potter on Unsplash