Tips & Tricks to Grow Your Business through Website Design
Hello there, if you are reading this, it is because you are about to move part of your business online or you have a business website you would like to improve. As a business owner, one of the things you soon realize about doing business online is that online is very different from offline.
Customers who come to you via your online portals will expect the same things as offline customers – quality, timeliness and integrity – but the processes by which you respond to those needs will be very different.
Online platforms deny you the advantage of face-to-face interactions. Customers do not have the privilege of touching the goods they want to buy or visiting your business premises to see the quality of your staff. All they have to go by is what they see online. That makes it harder to establish trust with online shoppers or prospects. What are the things you can implement in your web design to inspire customer confidence and improve performance?
But Why Website Design?
First impressions matter; people make their decisions about your business from what they see. The only thing online customers have is what you show them on your website. Based on the company website’s visual design alone, people can decide not to do business with you. Everything on your site – layout, colors and images – is communicating something to your customers. That is why you should pay attention to web design; it can make or break your business. To learn more about website design for your property management business, please read this article: UpkeepMedia.com/property-management-websites.
Website design tips and tricks to grow your business
1. Build trust
To be successful online, you must find ways to establish trust using the impersonal environment of a website. The website must convince people who only stumbled on it that you are trustworthy enough for business. The site should demonstrate the quality of your business and establish it as an authority by showing your expertise. But you can only achieve this if the design is consistent, easy to use and professional.
2. Do not try to reinvent the wheel
Do not try to be sensational with your website’s design. Use designs that have worked for other businesses. People who come to your site have seen several websites before yours. And their expectations of how websites should work have been framed by those experiences. By merely staying with modern and tested design standards, you help people feel more comfortable with using the site.
3. Don’t keep visitors guessing
It should be easy to detect the purpose of your website within a few seconds of the page loading. If visitors have to click around to find out what the site is about, you will lose them. Visitors arrive at your website with a defined purpose and in search of an answer. They will not hang around to find out if your business has the solution they want. Online visitors are lazy. Please do not force them to work; do the work for them.
4. Maintain design consistency
By keeping the design consistent across the entire website, you tell customers that your business is stable and dependable. Visitors expect websites to have a flow. Before they click from one page to another, they make their assumptions about how that next page should look. Changing the elements of a website will throw the visitor out of step. That will lead to less pleasant user experience.
5. Please keep it simple; remove clutter
Your website can try too hard to impress. Too many colors, information and features on a page will confuse users. Loading pages with features will paralyze visitors because most people can only successfully process two alternatives at a time. Additionally, navigating the site must be easy. At the minimum, every page of the site should be accessible from another page. Site navigation should be so intuitive that first-time visitors instinctively know where to find anything.
6. Use quality videos and images
Using video on your landing page will significantly decrease the bounce rate of the page and lead to more conversions. Videos are highly engaging because visitors do not have to do any work; they get explanations together with the information. In addition to videos, quality images will also lead to more engagement. Avoid using stock images on your website; a custom image that is relevant to your business and which resonates with your customers is preferable.
7. Pay attention to your call-to-action (CTA)
Everything you design on the site is to bring visitors to this single element of the website: the call-to-action. If website visitors fail to take the specific actions you want them to, you waste the whole effort. Improve your CTA’s power to grab attention by deploying colors, contrast, text and animation in a way that makes it impossible for visitors to gloss over this website element.
8. Make the website mobile-ready
The majority of users will visit your website on a mobile device. If the site does not render well on Smartphones and tablets, you will be losing significant traffic. Avoid this by using a responsive design for the website.