What separates a truly great website from an okay one?
Research shows that your customers expect your website to load within 2 seconds or less.[1] Then they make a judgment on whether they like it or not within the next 0.5 seconds.[1]
Can your website grab their attention, hold their interest, and engage them enough before they get bored and move on?
Engineering a successful website isn’t easy. It’s important to have a strategy in mind.
This article will explain the most important steps in planning and structuring a successful website design.
Capture Your Ideal Audience
Does your audience like simple, professional websites or flashy, colourful ones?
The first question you should ask yourself is, “Who is my audience?”
The age, gender, profession, median income, and location of your audience all play a big role in determining what your website should look like.
No one design can appeal to everyone. You must construct a virtual persona of your audience in your mind. Then understand what differentiates that demographic from countless others, then cater to them.
A video game website does fantastic with millennials and zoomers but might fare terribly with baby boomers instead.
A children’s website requires appropriately colourful tones and themes to catch their attention along with pleasing visuals unlike a stock broker’s website catering to no-nonsense investors.
Understand who your audience is, and keep their likes and dislikes in mind.
Learn From Your Competitors
The market moves fast, and your competitors might be lagging behind. Immediately understand what your competitors are doing, aren’t doing, and what they could be doing better to start with.
Research what your competitors know that you don’t. You will position your website relative to your competitors and the customers. It’s imperative to provide what your competitors offer while differentiating yourself from the crowd at the same time.
This is even more important in saturated markets where the only way you will acquire customers is by poaching them off existing competitors. This part is all about providing value while framing yourself as uniquely as possible.
Position your labels, buttons, texts, icons, and other elements better than your competitors. If your competitor’s design isn’t mobile-friendly, make yours as friendly as possible.
Research shows that 62% of companies that design their websites for mobile platforms go on to see increased sales.[2] Not surprising, considering that 51% of all digital media consumption is done via mobile.[2]
Integrate Your Goals And Architecture
A sitemap gives you a clear idea of your website structure.
Determine your categories of content, how deep each page layer goes, and how your hyperlinking will work across your pages.
The sitemap is the perfect place to get a bird’s eye view of your website to understand what the customer experience process will look like.
How does your product page link with all your content?
What does your customer feel the moment they fall on your landing page?
Where can they find your credentials?
Each page should be complete in itself. Think of each web page as a complete source of information that educates your customers on your content.
The flow of content will factor into your customer’s decision-making process and determine the ideal times where you can present them with a call to action to purchase your goods and services.
Follow The Best White Hat SEO Practices
The best-designed website in the world is useless if it fails to catch any traffic. Regardless of your design and content, you need to design your content with the right keywords in mind.
The keywords are how many customers will find your website on search engines, and you want to place your website ranking at the top of the list, above all competitors.
Choose the right synonyms for your keywords. Focus on creating authoritative, useful content that will bring true value to your customers.
This is the only way to earn the favour of SEO algorithms.
You might feel tempted to resort to black hat SEO practices. Don’t.
Keyword stuffing and other out of date practices will down-rank your websites to the bottom of the search results instead.
Strategically Place Call To Actions
The purpose of most websites is to sell. A powerful call to action is the first way to achieve that.
The content and media are simply the means to attract prospects. Your call to actions will determine how successfully your website converts traffic into conversions.
Using the sitemap, understand the overall customer experience of your website. All customers start at the landing page and proceed along a predetermined pathway to gaining more knowledge to help them become educated.
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Websites educate so that they, in turn, ultimately help customers in the decision-making process of purchasing goods or services.
You want to understand what each page represents in the overall stage of decision making and understand how better to guide your audience into making an informed purchase.
Crafting the perfect customer experience with a strategically placed call to action elements are critical to the success of any website.
A selling page designed to close a deal can contain one or more call to action buttons. Place one at the end of pages where the customers are encouraged to make a purchase, and spread others strategically throughout your website architecture to make them as appealing as possible.
Sources:
[1] https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/20-web-design-facts-small-business-owners/
[2] https://www.cognitiveclouds.com/insights/reasons-mobile-friendly-sites-increase-top-line-revenue/#:~:text=Thanks%20to%20statistics%20from%202014,with%20a%20mobile%20responsive%20website.
