Is your website any good? Ok, now ask yourself again, is it really any good? There’s no judgement here. We’ve been building websites for six years now and we are constantly surprised by the lack of attention that so many businesses pay to their websites. So why is this? Well, we have no idea, your website is the online centre of your business and needs to be up-to-scratch to attract and seal the business of your clients in ever-more saturated and busy markets. In this blog we’d like to highlight some of the fundamental elements of a functional and target market-relevant website.
Set the Tone with Website Design
Think of your website as a book, and strap in for a long analogy. Books come in all shapes and sizes for audiences of all persuasions, backgrounds and demographics. Every book is, or at least should be, written with a specific audience in mind. Therefore, establishing a tone of voice for your brand that suits your audience should be a priority. Your website is the beating heart of your online presence, once you have created and developed a brand image and tone of voice; you can then proliferate this message across every avenue of marketing that you utilise, knowing that when a prospective customer visits your website they will be met with the same tone of voice conveyed in your advertisements. This will build trust and recognition amongst your clientele.
Size Matters
Books can also vary in length, from short classics such as The Hungry Caterpillar to lengthy colossuses such as Stephen Kotkin’s 800 page biography of Stalin. Much like books, websites can vary in size; a website may have 1 page, 5 or 50, depending on the nature of the website and the amount of products or services being offered.
The key is to ensure that you are demonstrating enough value to your target audience in order to convert them into a client. For some businesses such as plumbers or photographers, this may only require a couple of pages, noting a price structure and a portfolio. Whereas for professional services or an engineering firm, a much larger website may be required in order to aptly demonstrate the quality and versatility of services on offer. You don’t want to overwhelm your clientele with page after page of repetitive content, but you do want to make sure they have enough to go off in order to instruct your services or buy your products.
User Experience and Mobile Optimisation
The days of the family computer are sadly dead, buried and behind us. By far the greatest online purchasing and search platform is mobile phones; everybody has one and everybody uses theirs with increasing frequency. Therefore, it is crucial that your pages are mobile-optimised in order to capitalise on this huge and ever-growing market. When we design websites we are incredibly conscious of this fact and ensure that every page, picture and paragraph will appear as intended on mobile phones and tablets. Though we are aware of this, a scary amount of businesses fail to optimise their pages for mobile users, meaning that their users’ experiences are poor and are unlikely to convert into customers.
It is also important to bear in mind that if you run social media adverts then these will most likely be viewed on a mobile, so it is imperative that the landing page the advert will deliver your customers to is optimised and fit for purpose. If not, you may have just wasted money on an advert which won’t return due to a poorly-optimised landing page.
Make the Most of the Online Marketplace
So as you can see, websites are pretty bloody important and as you might imagine, a great deal of people aren’t quite tech-savvy enough to design and build a beautiful and effective website. This is where we step in. When we were founded in 2013 it was as a web design company, since then we have picked up a few specialists who allow us to explore and operate in other avenues of digital marketing, but web design remains our true focus, passion and talent. If you are interested in a bespoke website, optimised for purpose and created to capture attentions, then get in touch today.
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