In our earlier post on Due Diligence and Research, we discussed the methods of acquiring the necessary information for your website strategy. With this information, the next step is to create a business optimised website that will entice customers to engage with your business. 

 

For most cases, a business website will be used as a sales and marketing tool to sell a company’s product or service. It makes little sense to invest your efforts in getting people to visit your website when your website is not doing its job properly, which is to sell.  Therefore, designing your website for this purpose is equally as important as optimising it for search engines and generating traffic.

There are 3 vital aspects that shouldn’t be overlooked when designing a business optimised website, and you should aim to tick as many boxes as possible in these areas.

Persuasive content

The content on your website should contain persuasive elements that will entice visitors to perform actions you want them to take. This could be an enquiry submission or the sale of products on your online store. In other words, these are your website goals that you want to acheive and are mainly used as a measure of results. 

The following questions should be considered when writing persuasive content:

1. What makes your business different than others?
   Differentiate your business by stressing points of differentiation. This should be something that your customers want or need.
2. What are the benefits for choosing your company over your competitors?
   List out the values that you offer and focus on describing benefits rather than features.
3. What is the best writing tone for engaging a conversation with potential customers?
   You can connect better with your audience if the right tone and language styles are used in your content.
4. Can the visitor’s experience be tailored?
   Based on the research of your target demographics, tailored written content addressing their needs can help you build trust quickly.

User Experience

One way of increasing website conversions is to enhance your visitor’s user experience. There are many techniques that can be applied, but we’ll only touch on three important ones that can significantly increase your visitor’s web experience.

1. Information architecture – Visitors arrive on your business website to seek information that will help them in the buying process, and it helps to include information that they’re looking for in appropriate sections on your website. Create a clear and organised website structure, with the help of site maps and navigation menus to make information searching a simple task.
2. Content medium - Determine the most effective way to deliver content. It can be audio, video, text, images or even interactive applications. We find that sales pages with a good video presentation can increase results significantly. For complex concepts, a diagram or chart can help the reader understand better, which enhances their browsing experience.
3. Website accessibility – Although this falls under your web designer’s responsibility, check that the finished website meets a good accessibility standard such that it can be accessed by anyone easily and conveniently. Ensure that your website has a consistent set of colours and fonts, with good spacing to allow easy consumption of content. Also make sure that your web designer is using the latest web coding standards when building your website, and that all website functions load up quickly without errors.

Visual Design

A good visual design can have a positive impact on your targets audience. When choosing a suitable look and feel of your website, consider the image and identity you would like to project to your website visitors. Work with your web designer and provide as much details as possible about your company’s personality and your audience’s characteristics. If you already have a branding theme for your business, use that fully in all visual elements of your website.

Here are some good examples.

Blooming Direct is an ecommerce store that sells gardening products and they’ve created a great shopping atmosphere for gardening lovers by using the contrasts of green and red in their colour scheme. That combined with colourful product images of flowers, it gives a similar mood and feel that you would experience in a garden.

To complement Haines Watts’ red branding theme, they’ve incorporated their brand colour consistently on several website elements such as titles, web links and images.

Not For Sale's charity campaign adopted a colour palette that has a combination of orange, black, grey and white. This colour scheme is used througouhly across their content, navigation menus, video players, links and etc.

 

 

A great website without visitors is like a Picasso painting stored in an attic. If nobody knows about it, it has no value. In the final post of this topic, we'll talk about how you can create a website marketing plan to drive not just visitors, but targeted visitors to your website.