It’s a given that any company that hopes to succeed in the 21st century should have a website. Even restaurants benefit from having a well-considered website because it helps get word out about their establishment and can serve as an intermediary; driving interest and perhaps accepting take-out orders or reservations. Below we’re going to take a look at some of the other ways effective web design can help grow your business.
- Branding – Few things help reinforce your brand better than effective website design. This type of brand reinforcement starts with the logo and extends to your company color scheme and typeface, which should be in harmony with your printed materials. Keep in mind that, unlike those printed materials, your website will be available to everyone on planet earth with an Internet connection. Now that’s brand exposure.
- Reliability – Whereas a poorly designed website that takes forever to load, has confusing navigation and a glitch heavy e-com component will drive customers away, effective web design that loads in seconds, has clear, easy to understand navigation and skillfully guides visitors to your hottest products will be a conversion engine.
- Visitor Retention – The longer someone lingers on your website the more likely they are to purchase something. So, one of the primary jobs of effective web design is to attract visitors and then give them a reason to stay. Once you’ve got their undivided attention you stand a much better chance of not just creating a new customer but a repeat customer.
- Responsive Design – In the old days of the late 90s/early 2000s web designers spent a lot of time making sure the sites they built displayed properly in both IE and Netscape. Today, things are a bit more complicated since your website needs to display properly on PCs and laptops, in Firefox, Safari, IE or Chrome and on any one of the hundreds of different smartphones out there.
- Scalability – If you plan on your company growing (and you should) then you should build that into your website. The last thing you want is to have to redesign and/or rebuild your site every time you introduce a new product line or open another office or outlet. A scalable website can be updated in practically no time by anyone on your staff with a rudimentary knowledge of website structure, HTML and a content management system like WordPress.
- Up Time – The first rule of a successful website is that it needs to be accessible. Sounds like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised at how many otherwise fine websites are dumped onto servers that never saw an opportunity for downtime they didn’t like. Ideally, your website you be accessible at least 99% of the time. More if possible. Any less downtime than that and you run the risk of driving even loyal customers away.
There are a lot of factors the influence the growth of your business. Making sure your website meets all the criteria outlined above will help position you for a more prosperous future.
