What does your website say about you and your brand?

Tips

Jun 25, 2018

User experience design

For the vast majority of potential customers, your website is the first indication they’ll get about what kind of business you are and the first insight into your brand character and values.

Make a good impression and they’re far more likely to become fully-fledged customers. Get it wrong and they will be out of there in a matter of seconds. The old cliché about first impressions holds true when it comes to websites. A poorly designed site will not foster trust – just the opposite.

So, let’s take a look at what the design of your site says about your business and how to make sure you’re making the right kind of first impression.

Your Website Design is Poor

If a potential customer visits your site and is immediately bewildered and confused about where to go, you’re immediately indicating that dealing with your firm might be confusing, frustrating and anything less than straightforward.
A good website should be clean, easy to navigate and intuitive for the user. Having a busy, cluttered site or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a bare and half-finished effort, will not engender trust or engagement.
Bad website design says to a customer that you don’t really care about appearances and haven’t invested the time to mould a good user experience. If this is the case, why should they think the customer experience will be any different?
Good website design shows that you care about appearances and you care about customers.

Unoptimised Browsing Experience

Google has long since stated that it services more search queries from mobile devices that it does desktop computers. Mobile phone internet access is also now poised to fully outstrip the use of a computer. Statistics show that 49.7 percent of web page views in 2017 were from mobile devices and Europe has a mobile broadband penetration rate of 76 percent. This means that half – and more in the years to come – of your potential customers will visit your site from their phone. If your site isn’t optimised to deal with this, then you’re sending a bad message. Patience is thin on the ground when it comes to mobile page loading times and potential customers will only wait for a couple of seconds before moving on. A grinding, poorly optimised site says that you either aren’t aware of the mobile internet revolution or you just don’t care. But you need to, because this isn’t a trend that’s going away. A good, mobile-optimised site is non-negotiable.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain
Optimised site created for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain

Bare Bones Content

If your business website is a listing of products and not much else, you’re only doing the minimum necessary and visitors will notice. It’s obviously great to have comprehensive listings of everything you offer, but it’s important to go beyond just that.
Content – whether it’s blog, testimonials or information about the company – is a key part of building a convincing, comprehensive brand. You wouldn’t have a bricks and mortar store with bare walls, naked lightbulbs and products thrown on the shelves, and you should think the same way when designing your website. The more robust and informative your site is, the more legitimacy it lends to your business and brand. Content also fosters trust and provides information and can move the customer through the awareness, consideration and decision making phases of the purchase cycle – meaning the more content you have, the more sales you’re likely to have too.

We Don’t Get Much Traffic Around Here…

One of the prime reasons many businesses fail to put the time and effort into their site is because they don’t feel it generates any business. Ironically, this is also the reason it doesn’t provide any benefits. Failure to invest in a website because it doesn’t do any business is a fatal self-fulfilling prophecy and one that needs to be removed at the root.
People will visit your website if you’re offering the service or product they want, but they won’t buy it if the site is an out of date mess. You need to be ready, willing and able to show the potential customer why they should go with you. Time invested in good site design begets more conversions and this should be the number one priority of any business.

Happy2Host can help with your website design and optimisation needs. With years of experience and a focus on your business, Happy2Host can provide a bespoke, quality website designed to meet your needs. Get in touch today.