When building a digital presence for your brand, it’s inevitable that you’ll need to invest in a website. There are many ways you can do this. For example, there are a wide range of simple drag and drop website design tools nowadays, which enable almost any web user to become an amateur web developer. While these are great, they do have limitations. Read more about the limitations of Wix for website design and development.
We’re quite often approached by small business owners who are unable to implement certain functionality within their websites, and, because many of their editors are not widely customizable, you can quite easily become tied into their themes and coding, which means you are limited on the level of customization. If you want to truly customise your website, you should find a platform that is highly customizable in terms of design and interactive features.
As times change, the way in which users interact with websites does too, that’s why professional websites are an important investment. Learn more about why every business needs a website.
With a website built on an open-source platform like Magento or WordPress, you’ll be able to action any necessary updates relatively quickly, depending on your coding ability and/or availability of a website developer.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the key elements to consider when planning and designing your new website.
Achieving the end goal
It’s important that a website is fit for purpose. If you’re looking to build brand awareness and generate leads, a simple website design will be sufficient. Whereas if you’re a growing eCommerce brand, you’ll need to develop something which showcases your products in a way that makes it quick and easy for a user to complete their purchase.
Amazon does this really well, with the ‘Buy Now’ button which instantaneously completes a checkout process. Other things to consider nowadays are payment gateways and options.
For example, according to Forbes, ⅔ smartphones have the PayPal App installed. As card fraud continues to rise, the popularity of mobile payment apps does too. Having these as payment options can considerably increase consumer confidence. The key point here is that a ‘tied platform’ will not necessarily allow you to pioneer or develop your own creative ideas.
Branding
It’s important that your website showcases your brand in the right light. This means that using the right font types, colours and logos throughout is essential. This is because consistency builds trust and it allows you to produce a seamless experience for the user, which is great for establishing brand loyalty. If you feel your branding is in need of a refresh or review, get in touch with the design team at Digital Glue today.
Ease of use
If I had £1 for every time I’d found catastrophic issues with website navigation, I’d be a millionaire by now. When producing a wireframe for a website, we always consider how easy it will be for a user to locate and navigate to that area of the website. Is it logical? If it doesn’t make sense, then don’t put the page there. If the page doesn’t fulfill an objective, then the page more than likely isn’t needed.
In an era of mobile first indexing and increased competition, we want to make sure the user can achieve what they want, in as few clicks as possible. Learn more about creating a website that engages and converts.
Say the right thing, at the right time
Content is often overlooked. As digital marketers, however, we know that this is one of the key pieces in the website SEO puzzle. Anyone can write content, but writing content which effectively addresses the users intention on each and every page across your website is an art.
It’s important that you really focus on writing meaningful content and not just producing something for the sake of it. I echo my point above, if the page and/or the content doesn’t fulfill an objective, it’s probably not needed. The fewer pages you have on a website, the quicker it will load and the easier it will be for both users and search engine crawlers to navigate and understand. One of our recent posts shares 13 content writing tips which will help your website rank in search.
Create the WOW factor
Back in the day when the world wide web was invented, coding languages were far more basic than they are today. As times have progressed, the power and ability of developer code continues to adapt, which means we can do more and more impressive things on a website, from eye-catching movements to sweep users down a page, to animated graphics. Whatever you want to do, we can help build it. We say that because we’re motivated by creating that WOW factor through truly unique website designs. Find out more about what we’ve achieved for our clients.
Are you interested in finding out what a new website design can do for your business? At Digital Glue we extract client goals and objectives in order to create a website which is tailored to their needs. Contact the team at Digital Glue today to find out more.
