Do you think it’s time to have a website in order to expand your company’s scope? You are absolutely right. A survey conducted by Clutch in 2016 showed that nearly half of small businesses in the US still do not own a website. Among those, 32% think that it would not be “relevant for the business/industry”.
At Wiredelta®, we believe that an online presence, a website, is crucial to a business’ success. Why? Because a website is a cost-saving tool that ensures your presence 24/7 online and worldwide alike, enabling you to inform people of who you are, what you do and how to contact you, which would eventually lead to a sales increase. Go for it!
However, do not dive head-first into website creation without first asking yourself a few basic questions. Ultimately, your website aims to make your business more profitable but to achieve that, be as much customer-centric as possible.
“How can I make my website a lucrative platform?” No. “How can I create a great browsing experience for my clients?” Yes, you got it. Therefore, ask yourself:
- What are the latest trends in terms of user-friendliness and design?
- What kind of message would potential customers be interested in?
- How can I make the website more visible and accessible to them?
This is not an exhaustive list but trying to answer those questions should put you on the right track and this is just what we are about to do right now.
1. People judge the book by its cover: look professional & simple
A website, more particularly – the homepage, is the storefront of your business. Customers will form their first opinion of who you are based on your website.
Beware, this mental process can be rather fast. A study demonstrated that 50 milliseconds were enough for people to make an impression about a website. Now the question is: how to make a good impression?
Well, let’s think about it – what would make a visitor remain on a homepage? We believe that it depends on how reliable and user-friendly you look.
How can you work on it? Build a relevant brand identity, which reflects your personal style and the industry you are in. Potential customers will be more inclined to trust the quality of your products and services if you look professional.
On the other hand, make sure you limit the number of options/buttons on your homepage and pick a sleek design. A website looking too complex will virtually make your visitors run away.
velco.bikeThe Wink Bar homepage: refined design and simplicity
2. KISS UX: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Great job. Your visitors decided to remain on your website to find out how you could help them. As you can surely guess, a website is not only about looking user-friendly, it’s more about being user-friendly. We thought of three different levels you can activate in order to improve user experience:
- Speed: If you’re a frequent web user, you’ve probably not experienced anything more frustrating than waiting years for a page to load. Waiting for more than 2 seconds is a pain. Waiting more than 5 seconds is an “I’ll never go back to this website again” experience.
Speed should be your main concern! Fortunately, you have many means to increase the loading speed at your disposal: picking the right hosting solution, resizing pictures, avoid using too many plugins etc. You can find a variety of helpful methods here. Take a look! - Design: You wonder whether your website is well-designed? Ask yourself whether you grandma would easily interact with it? Nope? No worries, here are a few tricks you can work on. For example, favor under-design instead of over-design, make your website good-looking with images and easy-to-read with bullet points.
- Responsiveness: The desktop version of your website looks great. Gorgeous, but do make sure that it’s responsive so that the mobile version displays properly its content for your users!
You will find a variety of other tips on this infographic.
pixabay.comResponsiveness is a key component of user experience
3. Be relevant, be useful
Don’t spend too much time explaining what you do. Your goal is to be persuasive, not explanatory. Being relevant is about addressing your message to the right people while being useful is about addressing a valuable message to those people.
So first think of your target audience. What field are they working in? What are they looking for? This will help you think of how you are going to deliver your message.
Indeed, people are keen to know how useful your services can be for them. Feel free to boast and be accurate. “We build beautiful websites” is nice but how impactful is it compared to “Our web designers will help you increase your conversion rate to 42%”? Go straight to the point: What is your value proposition? How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
One good way of phrasing your message properly is to write it in this way: “We help X do Y by doing Z”.
4. Make all the roads lead to yourwebsite.com
Accessibility should be another key element of your online strategy. Having a useful and user-friendly website is hardly beneficial if nobody actually browses through it. A good way of making people aware of your website is first to message your present customers and let them know how it will make their life easier. If they are satisfied with your services and find your website easy to use, they might even spread the word.
You may also use your social media accounts. Depending on the number of followers you have, you could use them in order to pass on the message.
Finally and most importantly, you will have to maximize your visibility within the results of your potential customers’ search engine. You may consider two different and complementary ways of doing so. Once launched, your website will not be in pole position in terms of organic search. Some paid search can’t harm! It can help you boost your visibility at the beginning.
Take a look at Google AdWords, assess your budget, pick relevant keywords and there you go. As time goes by, your website’s ranking will naturally increase with the number of clicks as well as with content creation. Start a blog and begin publishing quality posts on topics that matter to your clients without forgetting to do backlinking.
Within a few months, you will have a few dozens of relevant articles to refer to next posts and you’ll, therefore, keep on increasing the potential number of clicks and your visibility among the search results. At some point, you might find that Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is no more useful as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is doing all the job!
5.Convert the try
All these efforts made in order to build and promote your website now deserve some kind of reward, right? Your original aim was to expand your business and a website is just the right tool for it. Let’s go through a few extra tips that should help transform your leads into customers!
- Use attractive call-to-action buttons: You do not necessarily need flashy colours to bring your “Sign up” and “Add to cart” buttons out, a simple contrast with the background colour can make a lot. A/B testing (Shall I use a red or a green button? Shall I use a round or a square one?) can help you improve the design over time.
- Refer to your products and services in your blog posts: Don’t actually write articles directly promoting your product or service but feel free to mention at some point (why not as a conclusion?) how your activity is related to the trend you are analyzing in order to whet the curiosity of your readers.
- Value-based Exit Overlay: A customer decides to end a trial version before going premium. You may display a page or a pop-up offering a discounted fee for a premium that might make your customer change his mind. Though such tactics can sometimes be perceived as annoying, they do increase the conversion rate in practice.
- (Value-based) Email retargeting: Your tracking tools make you realize that a customer was about to buy a product and then left the page. Why not sending him an email “Product X is still in your shopping cart”? Up to you to decide whether you are willing to offer him a discount in order to foster purchase.
2xecommerce.comExit overlay can be very annoying in terms of user experience, make sure you offer a valuable proposition to your visitors
Conclusion
You are now as ready as you can be to launch your website! Don’t forget to think constantly three steps ahead. Be aware of the latest trends in terms of web design and user experience in order to keep on offering an optimal navigation experience to your users.
For this matter, you may also consider favoring open source solutions such as WordPress or Drupal as they will enable you to have at your command a maximum number of possibilities in terms of design and functionalities. A modern and customized website gives you a better chance of making your visitors stick around and eventually purchase.
Wiredelta’s soon-to-launch platform will be based on WordPress. Therefore it includes all the benefits of open source CMS. We currently have more themes than Wix, Weebly and Squarespace combined! Not to mention that our AI assistant will be providing you a 24/7 support. If you are curious to learn more about how we plan to help startups build professional websites, visit our website.
