Everyone loves a pretty website, but far too often the website does not provide information that is valuable to customers and potential customers in terms of identifying your business and your brand. Use the suggestions below to ensure that your web design includes effective branding details to promote and distinguish your business.
When you’re designing your website, design it to last for awhile. Technology for websites changes frequently but the costs of updating often can quickly become too large for many small businesses to handle.
Specific technology updates will be unavoidable, but through a timeless web design you can keep your current website for as long as technology permits. Your web design’s goal should be the timeless little black dress rather than the out-of-date hot pants look of the 1970’s, to use a fashion comparison.
Determine where you want essential contact information and icons to connect your customers or potential customers to social media to appear. If you have other interactive capabilities that you want to include, make sure you identify them at the outset so that you can include them in your web design.
Take time to write out your branding message even if you’ve been in business for awhile. You can try writing your message out in the form of a mission statement, including what your company is committed to or you can write a list of values and distinguishing features that you believe have contributed to your company’s viability.
Your written branding message will be useful for you to use when choosing tags, keywords and descriptions for your business so that it can be found on the internet when customers or potential customers perform searches.
Describe your business fully. The description of your company should clearly identify what you’re selling or have to offer to the consumer.
Read through your list or description of your company and highlight the three most important distinguishing traits your company has. For instance, if you believe you work hard at customer service, that might be true and interesting but it’s also a commonplace claim made by many companies and you should not waste space on your website with such text. Instead, highlight your level of customer service in terms of specifics such as responding to inquiries or protecting customer privacy.
Make your commitment to customers who take action and contact your company, and whatever you promise, make it true. When web designers include the classically termed “call to action” to get customers to respond, they sometimes seem to forget that they are supposed to be honest.
Your website will frequently be the first impression your company makes on someone, so don’t try to lure them into responding with a less than 100 percent genuine representation of what you’re offering. If you promise live 24/7 customer service and the number you provide is basically a message center where phone representatives take a lot of information and promise to have someone get back to the individual, you’ve lost customers.
Your efforts to clearly identify your brand in the business world will help you more effectively design your website. Use the tips above to create a web design that considers your brand.