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Will Rogers, the famed performer during the Vaudeville era, once said, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” In the digital age, this statement is more valid than ever – especially when running an online business.
Your website is the first impression potential customers receive when learning about your business. A well-constructed website encourages visitors to learn more about your business, sign up for email newsletters, interact with your support team and, most importantly, buy from you.
When looking at your website, it’s important to ask yourself whether it’s empowering your customers to want to get to know your business or if it’s causing them to make a beeline for the “close” button. If your answer is the latter, there’s no need to panic – there are several factors that make up a successful, effective website.
Implementing these five features of successful web development will ensure increased sales and reduced bounce rates for your business, creating a loyal customer base for many years to come.
What Does Your Business Do?
When visitors land on your website, they should have a clear understanding of who you are and what you offer. Writing clear, concise website copy describing your business goes a long way in converting visitors into customers – make sure your website tells them who you are in a way that appeals to them.
The best practice is to avoid overexplaining with lengthy jargon (think Homer Simpson’s “Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net”) while staying away from broad, vague descriptions (like George Constanza’s “The Human Fund”). Find your happy medium that convinces customers that you have just what they need and that you’re the only business that can give it to them!
Capture the Right Audience With Attractive Web Design
Appealing web design is pivotal to attracting the right customers for your business. If you’re targeting millennials or Gen Z, perhaps muted colors and formal-looking design elements aren’t the right choices. Companies marketing to moms will likely avoid any web design that traditionally appeals to a masculine audience.
If you don’t know what you want your design to look like during your web development, start by learning more about your audience. An experienced digital advertising agency, such as IDG Advertising, can help you by completing extensive research on identifying the right target audience for your business’s needs. Once you have your audience figured out, you’re free to incorporate colors, images, words and other design elements that will successfully bring that audience to you.
Captivating Photo and Video
Any respectable website will have more than just endless blocks of text. To provide a more fluid aesthetic, photography and video are a must for any web development project.
Photos with smaller file sizes will help your website load quickly, keeping your customers interested in your page. Larger images will take up more bandwidth, resulting in longer loading times – a surefire way to get users to take their business elsewhere!
Videos should be short, engaging and get straight to the point to keep your customers watching your content. Some examples of successful video content include product or service demos, informational videos or testimonials from actual customers.
Navigation That’s Easy To Get Around
Congratulations! Your website’s design is enticing customers – but what are you going to do to keep them engaged? The key to moving your customers from interest to conversion is to make your website’s navigation as seamless as possible.
During your web development phase, take time to implement a navigation bar that’s easy to use and just as easy to find. Businesses far too often make the mistake of creating a sleek, hidden navigation bar in an effort to appear trendy and sophisticated, but the result is quite the opposite – customers become frustrated with the inability to quickly find it and move on to a competitor’s website.
To ensure a visually appealing and accessible navigation bar, choose contrasting colors that make it stand out from the rest of the page. Some suggestions include highlighting the options on the navigation bar or making those options a different color than the rest of the bar.
Simplifying your navigation menu is another great way to make it easy to access. Try combining your navigation bar with dropdown menus – place a dropdown after each main category, allowing visitors to choose more options after one click.
Mobile-friendly Web Development
Statistics show that mobile devices make up 52 percent of all website traffic across the entire Internet. We live in a world where everything we could possibly need is literally in the palm of our hands, including access to information and businesses we may be interested in.
A website’s responsiveness – the ability to adapt a website design to fit any given device a visitor could use – is a critical sign of successful web development. Navigating a desktop version of a website on a mobile device can be annoying, tiresome and flat-out inconvenient, resulting in visitors bouncing to another business’s page.
To make the most of your mobile device optimization, work alongside a digital marketing company specializing in web development and implementing responsive design on each page.
Crossing these five tasks off your web development checklist can seem like a daunting task – the good news is that you don’t have to do it alone! IDG Advertising is the leading digital marketing agency in Orange County when it comes to helping businesses of all sizes meet their web development needs. Our web design team will put your business at the forefront of the digital landscape by creating a high-performance, visually appealing website that attracts customers and provides optimized functionality. Need more than just web design? We have a full suite of digital marketing services, including SEO marketing, social media engagement and personalized branding design. Call us at (714) 221-4377 or contact us online to learn more about how IDG can elevate your business today!
