by blastoff | May 22, 2019 | Website Design
Working with website design specialists in Colorado can make all the difference in the success or failure of your business. In all industries, there are plenty of examples of how to and how not to approach web design. Whether your products or services are targeted to other businesses or to customers, your website will either bring in more sales, or scare people away from your brand.
Hiring a local website design specialist in Colorado can also make a large difference in the effectiveness of your site and improve the impact of your investment in design services.
Why a Local Website Design Expert in Colorado Matters
Before we get into specific elements of web design that increase sales conversions, let’s discuss the power of a good local web designer. There are obviously many options out there for getting your website professionally designed and developed. Generally, if the service is much cheaper than competitors, you’ll be working with someone from another country or an inexperienced designer just getting started.
Don’t get me wrong. There are potentially projects out there in which you would prefer to pay a lower price for design services and you don’t mind working with people in different areas of the world, but working with local designers allows for easier, faster communications, complete with face-to-face meetings that would only happen across time zones and over computers with out-of-state designers. Quicker communication means clearer communication and faster response and turn-around times for design work and projects. You’ll have your website operational much faster.
Five Essential Website Design Elements
Don’t be afraid to ask how your potential web designer would implement these essentials. (See more design elements here.)
- Clean and Branded Elements
In general, the busier your homepage is, the slower it will load, and the more customers will be overwhelmed and turned off. If you need hundreds of words of content to educate potential customers, try to break it up and place it on other pages, or better yet, turn that written content into a video.
Above all, everything included on your website needs to be on-brand. You must stick to your company logo, colors, and keep all your content—written or recorded—in line your core messaging and your value proposition.
- Mobile Optimization
Your webpage might look great on a desktop, but if its design doesn’t translate to mobile devices, you’ll be missing out on an entire population of users who will move on to your competitors when they try to visit your site on their phones. In this case, you’ll need a designer to convert what you have for desktop viewers to mobile designs. Mobile users are taking over the Internet, and there’s no sign mobile views will lose significance anytime soon.
- Easy-to-Use Forms and Navigation
This concept speaks to the overall functionality of your site. While developers make the buttons work the way they’re supposed to, website design experts in Colorado must consider how the website is laid out. If the buttons work the way they’re supposed to but your customers can’t find them or don’t understand what they do, they won’t interact with your site (by buying products, for example). Your order screen (or shopping cart) should be as intuitive as finding information on your products is.
- Security
For most businesses, it doesn’t hurt to protect your customers as much as you can by beefing up your website security. Moving from HTTP to HTTPS encryption is a task most website design experts in Colorado can handle, it’s relatively cheap to do, and its an effective way to protect all your visitors’ information, particularly when they’re entering their credit card information to buy your products.
- Contact Us Page
Adding a contact page may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many businesses forget to add them to their webpage. Even if your page has full functionality, meaning customers can progress through the entire sales process without leaving your site or contacting a person in real-time, a certain percentage of your site visitors will become frustrated if they can’t easily reach out to you or your customer service team. At the very least, create a small, simple webpage with an email address you’ll actually check.
Experience Matters
Make sure your website design expert in Colorado understands your business goals and has the experience and skills to make your website both functional and well laid out.
by blastoff | May 22, 2019 | Website Design
Website design in Colorado and development go hand-in-hand. A great-looking website can’t be expected to convert site visitors into clients and customers if the links don’t work. Likewise, no one will want to look at a poorly-designed website that has fast, intuitive functionality. Customers expect easy navigation of your website and they expect it to look not only professional but like a site that matches your brand’s look and feel. The most successful online businesses these days combine functionality with design.
So how exactly does website design affect your Colorado business? There are many aspects of web design to consider, as well as metrics related to design you should pay attention to as you develop and expand your site.
First, let’s examine a few elements of your website’s design that are affecting your bottom line positively or negatively right now:
Website Design in Colorado and Your Business
The most important design concept for any website you expect visitors to use to buy your products and services from is simplicity. Knowing your target audience and what they want from your brand, you should put the products, services, and information you know most visitors want first “above the fold.” This newspaper concept simply means putting the most important information at the top of the page, so that users don’t have to scroll down to get what they want. This is easier said than done if your products or services require education of your audience, but the more you can prioritize certain pieces of information and links by keeping them above the fold, the better off your user experience will be. (For more elements of web design style, click here).
Play with Color
Color is an important yet underrated part of any website’s design. Simply changing your call-to-action button on your homepage from one color to another can increase conversions. Think about the emotional impact of certain colors and your target audience. If your ideal customer is a woman, for example, blues, purples, and greens are generally more effective.
Use Video
A picture is worth a thousand words, and studies by researchers the world over are finding that a video is almost worth a thousand pictures. Some research (such as this study by Digital Commerce 360) has shown that product videos have increased sales and conversions by as much as 144%. As a rule of thumb, a video showing your product’s differentiating factors or of company leaders explaining their mission statements make customers feel more comfortable with your brand and retain more of the information you’re trying to provide to them.
Clear Unique Value Proposition and Call-to-Action
This is the bread and butter of your website. It’s the button customers click on to sign up or order. It’s the reason why they should sign up or order. Writing effective Unique Value Propositions (UVP) and Calls-to-Action (CTA) is difficult enough. Don’t hide that carefully crafted copy in an inconvenient area of your website, put these crucial sentences where they deliver the clearest message to the casual visitor who may need to be convinced of your brand’s positivity.
Metrics to Watch
Any website design company in Colorado will set you up with ways to measure the effectiveness of your design choices. The problem with many business owners is that they focus on the wrong metrics and make the wrong changes. Here are a few metrics you should pay attention to that indicate successes and flaws in your design (see more here):
Mobile Visitors and Engagement
These days, if your website doesn’t translate well to mobile devices, you’re missing out on huge swaths of potential customers visiting your site. Customers don’t have time to turn their phones to the side and squint at tiny copy not optimized for their small phone screens. If you notice the vast majority of your site’s visitors are on desktops, you need to take a look at your mobile site optimization because you could be missing out on sales and conversions.
Load Time
Do large swathes of users visit your site and leave within a minute? It could be because of load time. Customers expect websites to load in the snap of their fingers. Even a slight delay in load time causes many to lose interest and/or navigate away from your site to a competitor’s.
One factor that increases load time is the web hosting service you’re using, but overloading your webpage with too much content, especially pictures and videos, will slow load time as well.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a common metric examined by web developers and designers and often obsessed over by business owners. The bounce rate shows how many visitors come to your site, see the first page they land on, then, without clicking on another link on your website, leave, usually without spending more than a minute interacting with your page. If your bounce rate is high, customers are experiencing something either functionality- or design-related that is turning them away from your brand.
Make sure your website design expert in Colorado can maximize your website’s potential.
by blastoff | May 22, 2019 | Website Design
Building a website is not as easy as it might seem. Many business web design platforms out there promise fast website set-ups for flawless webpages designed to convert sales. But as every website design expert in Colorado knows, creating a working, professional website takes time and either money or expertise. Putting a product out on a platform like WordPress is one thing, but producing a website that will build your brand, either business or personal, and keep clients and customers coming back to you is entirely different. That’s why you need a website design expert in Colorado who can help you build the perfect site for your business or personal needs.
Tips from a Website Design Colorado Expert
Before we look at the specific ways you can improve your website design, you must consider hiring an expert to do this work for you. While you might have some coding or web design chops, if you’re trying to build your business and a website at the same time you expect to use to sell products and services, you’ll get burnt out quickly and make mistakes. A web design expert can take your vision for your site and your brand and turn it into a working website that your clients will love interacting with. When your clients easily access your products and services on your site, they’ll keep coming back and referr other customers.
When choosing which website design expert in Colorado you want to build your site, keep these design tips in mind to formulate questions for them. These tips are from design experts at the cutting edge of the industry, and if your website designer doesn’t know anything about them, it might be time to look another way.
Three Tips for Effective Website Design
1. Create a plan
Before any website designer takes on your project, a plan with a concrete goal must be laid out. If a prospective web designer doesn’t ask you about your plans and goals for your website, run for the hills. A good way to form a plan before you start looking for web design experts is to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. Map out your buyer’s journey from start to finish and decide how you want that journey to work and look like. Ask yourself which webpages you want your buyer to land on when they’re browsing products and making purchases. What does your ideal website look like and how should it behave?
A good web designer will have suggestions for you, but you can’t expect anyone to jump in and start building your website with no roadmap. Likewise, your roadmap should be the guiding documentation for any web designer.
2. Keep it Uncomplicated
Websites trying to sell products and services don’t need things like complex animations, long, complicated content, or obvious stock photos. All those elements devalue your website and your brand. Your website has to make an impression in eight seconds or less to new visitors. If they can’t find the information they want in that time, they’re going to move on to another company.
With regard to content, you need to find ways to stand out among your competitors. Confusing, ambiguous, or repetitive content is just as important as the color of your font and the layout of your page. Check up on your competitors, see what words they’re using, and try to differentiate your brand using language.
A good question to ask your possible website design expert in Colorado is, can I look at your last project? If you notice long, unbroken content littered with jargon and stock photos, walk away.
3. Straightforward, Lean Navigation
There are many differences, obviously, between website design and website development, but navigation is a natural meeting point of the two. Development has to do with how well your site’s navigation works, as in, when a visitor clicks on the ‘Products’ button, they see the ‘Products’ page come up. Design is more concerned with whether or not the navigation system makes sense.
Is the home page accessible from all other landing pages? Can customers who have questions find your content marketing section? When it’s time to buy, can customers easily add things to their cart and check out as quickly as they can on Amazon?
Create a Working Website
Creating a working website is about much more than design. The look, feel, and functionality of the site reflects on your brand and your products or services. Don’t settle for anything but the best website design services in Colorado.