Your website is an online digital representation of your company and it likely has a bigger effect on your bottom line than you might think. The website is very often a visitors first impression of your business. Over 75% of online visitors will judge a company solely by its website presence, so if your website is hard to navigate, outdated, or not mobile-friendly then it may very well be time to begin looking into designing a new website for your company.

A great website is more than just sales copy and graphics, it should be comprised of important elements that contribute to the overall purpose of the website, which is to convey your companies message. Over 65% of website redesigns do not perform well or completely fail, and it is primarily due to a lack of planning. In order to be successful, it is a good idea to fully map out your entire website redesign prior to starting the project.

Elements of an Effective Website

Brand Message

As soon as someone visits your website, your message should be pretty clear to your audience: What does your business provide? What are the benefits of your product or service? How are you different from your competition?

Visitors will research to find out if your company is a fit for them based on their initial impressions of your website, and your brands message will effect whether or not  they become customers.

Structuring the Website

The structure of your website will be important to your visitors experience. An effective website should be very simple to navigate and feel somewhat familiar in its layout. You have to put yourself in the position of your user, would you want to stick around if you were to visit your own website?

Make finding what they need as easy as possible, with clear calls to action. For instance, when a visitor clicks on a service, it should be obvious as to where they can click next in order to request a quote, make a purchase, or find more information.

Design & Identity

Great web design should have the ability to inform your visitors and potential customers about the business and its values, solely through the look and feel of the design. When a visitor is using a website that is clean, organized and simple to use, they tend to relate those kinds of things to how the company does business. In a moment, a user will judge whether they think a company is a match for them just by taking in the personality of the website they are browsing.

Building Trust

A website needs to start by looking professional since that goes a long way towards building trust, and earning that trust is essential to making a sale and getting a new customers. One thing you can do to begin to build trust and establish a meaningful connection is by showcasing testimonials and reviews on your website. That feature alone has been proven to increase conversion rates by nearly 60%.

You always want to have a system in place that allows you to encourage your happy customers to leave feedback and reviews. The easier you can make it for them the better.

Website Marketing Goals

An effective website should be created for converting visitors into paying customers. Prior to searching out a website design company, it is very important to have an understanding of the exceptions you set for your new website. So you will want to figure out what you are wanting your website to accomplish:

• Increased traffic
• More phone calls
• More leads
• Increased average order spending

Once you are able to define what it is you are looking to accomplish, you will then need to figure out how best to achieve your goals. A good place to start is to look at you current KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) ie business goals. Such as: How many times has your form been filled out? What kind of traffic are you getting? which pages are performing well? It is always highly recommended to have a website audit done on your current website to see what possible opportunities you may be missing. From there you can create objectives that are both attainable and measurable, such as lowering your bounce rate, increasing time visitors spend on the website, improving the websites on-page optimization, etc.

Prior to finding a new website design company, you should be able to answer some questions like. “What are our Websites goals?” If you simply answer with “To make it look better”, you may want to dig a little deeper.

An alternative answer could be something like “Increasing traffic by 30%” Having specific goals like this will only help your website designer because it can give them further guidance on specific elements to focus on in order to achieve a given objective. Other examples could be increasing leads by 20%, creating additional product landing pages, more having 25% more customers fill out your request a quote form. By having clear business goals in place, you have a much better way of measuring the success of your website redesign.

Partnering with the right Website Design Company

A website redesign is an investment into the success of your company and who you choose to help build it will have a significant impact on whether the project succeeds or fails. So do your due diligence and research potential website design companies to see if their company aligns with your own business goals and objectives. You should be asking questions about the company’s capabilities, communication skills, specialties, portfolio, and more. When preparing your company for a website redesign it is important to focus on the strategy first. It helps to start with answering the question “What’s the primary purpose of the website and how will it contribute to the growth of the business”, and you can begin building from there. If you are still not quite sure the best way to plan out your website design, feel free to reach out to our website design experts to help you with your redesign project.