Thinking of redesigning your website?

Important things about web design

What makes a great web design?

Ok, lets be honest. This is going to be the face of your business online, and there is nothing more important than making a good first impression. You must be proud of your website because if you're not, you won't share it. If it looks old fashioned or it has elements that are not important to your business your competition might crush you! It is imperative that you have the best website in your industry. Your competition should be looking at you for inspiration. So when you are shopping for a website, it should be a professional looking, and preferrably affordable website design (we offer web design starting at $299). However, a website is way more than just looks. Below we will cover important a few key elements to think about when designing your website.

Stay on topic = NO guessing for visitors!

Your website must be clear and straight to the point. You have less than 5 seconds to capture your visitors attention. If you are not clear on your message or what you are selling you may lose that precious lead that just saw your website. Use images to showcase your business (having a large image slider is a great idea). You will notice most of our websites have an image slider and our customers have a great response to it. Text is also extremly important. Even though most people tell us "I do not want alot of text on my website", having written literature on your website is very important. This is because Search Engines don't see your site like visitors! Search Engines are robots or 'bots' that were developed to visit and analyse your website. They capture the information on your website and save into a massive database for search queries. Now these robots do not see or read images! So if your website has no text, in the robots eyes your website is totally empty. Now with that said, some of our customer do not care about search engines results. These customers are most of the time artists, photographers or a small site promoting a party or a website for a show or movie that has a lot of graphics. For them the most important thing is to have something cool and attractive to look at. They don't care about the search engines, so they are an exception to the rule. But for 99.9% of businesses, being found online is the number one priority. Lucky for you we understand this and will help you with the look and feel of the website and also the amount of text you should be writing or what you should be writing about.

Call to action!

AHA! Now we are getting to the good part! Having a call to action is awesome! Before determining what call to action to use on your website it's important for the web design agency that you choose to know everything about your business goals.

If you are a party rental company and you are almost never in your office, or hardly ever check your email, a web form is not right for you. You'd take too long to reply to your visitors inquiry. A great call to action for you would be a phone call, so displaying your phone number on the website is your number one priority. In this case a phone number should always be placed on top right hand corner of the website. It's also a good practice to put the phone number on the bottom of the page and somewhere in between both. This ensures that your visitors do not have to search for your phone number. Believe it or not a phone number will also give you a great amount or credibility. If a business does not have a phone number a customer might start to distruste it and think you are not a real business. So display it nicely! Also, make sure its text never an image, as phones will not read it well and you will not have click to call action.

2nd Example. Let's say you are the owner of a timeshare company. You have a good amount of sales people in your team and you need to keep them busy. Phone calls would be ok but, a web form would be much better so you can capture the customers information, save into your database, give it to the right sales person, track how many leads are coming into your company, and turn that lead into a conversion. Conversion is a term that basically means "Deal Closed" for that lead. Your goal is to have as many conversions as possible from forms and phone calls generated from the website.

As you can see having some type of action on your website is very important. Other types of call to action could be: making a sale on an ecommerce website, a sign up or register form, and the list goes on and on. All of these focus on the same element "Conversion".

Credibility and Security to your customers

Now that you got the items above covered, a good practice when creating a new web design is to show customers how great you are at what you do. This is usually done be by showing some of your work, or having testimonials and reviews on your website. This will motivate visitors of your website that are not 100% sure of making the call to action to finally make it happen.

Another important element for your website would be showing reliability and security to your customers. This can be achieved by affiliating yourself with other credible companies. A few examples could be Better Business Bureau (BBB), the chamber of commerce in your area, or any other type of credible companies showing that you are a serious and trusted business. This is not only good for your credibility but it will also help you with the search engines result. Affiliating yourself with strong website companies show the 'bots' of the search engines that you are a strong company, and your visitors that they should consider you before the competition.

Marketing, Marketing & More Web Design Marketing!

So, you want to be successful online? There is only one way to do it, having a great website and marketing it like crazy! Not marketing your website is pretty much the same thing as not having a website. Imagine this, you open a beautiful restaurant, you are a great chef and the food is great, the restaurant looks impressive when you walk in. Then you do nothing but open the front door. If you are in a great area you might get some customers but if you are in hidden location you will get zero! With a website you have no location, and if you don't advertise you will get nothing! A great online marketing strategy should be a big part of your plan. Here are some important things to know about marketing and do not be fooled by other web design agencies!

Lots of agencies will try to sell you marketing before you even finish your website. If your goal is to target only a local area, lets say your zip code and 5 adjacent ones, this might be OK. This because targeting local search results is easier than a national or state wide campaign. If your goal is to attract more attention in general from the site, state and nationwide, these packages are usually less than ideal. When you are getting a package deal from the agency it's important that they have this 3 basic requirements:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) The most basic element is SEO as its a never ending element. Learn more by seeing our services.

2. Local Listings - This is what allows you to have a directory listing on local search results such as google maps, yellow page etc.

3. Social Media - This should include all the social medias you work with. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus at least!

These are just the basics that every marketing effort should have. But a more in depth way of marketing is done when the website is finished and live. The web design agency you choose should review your online rankings on the search results, create a formal proposal depending on your budget and present it to you. This proposal should have several important information, such as current ranking information, proposed goals, your prediction for ROI "Return on Investment" and how many conversions can be expected.

Another great way to advertise online is by doing pay per click advertising. Adwords is one of the best ways to advertise online as you will be able to measure everything on your ROI. Online marketing campaigns are highly measurable, more so than other types of traditional marketing. Having a google partner agency work for you is as good as it gets. Web Designer Express is a proud Google Partner and can assist you on this and every other marketing point above. By now, you should have a much better understanding of how the website design, development and marketing are interconnected. It's time for you to take the next step and call us to speak to our professional team. Our Web design starting at 299 offer is the perfect place to start if you are looking to build a new website. When you talk to us you will get a feeling of our extensive knowledge and passion about web design. Take the next step and give us a call now.