Web Design: What to Look for

Web Design: Quality Matters

Web design is one of the most important subjects for your company to get correct. Studies show that it requires less than a tenth of a second for customers to decide if they will stay or leave your website. With potential customers moving through your website or heading into the arms of a competitor this quickly, a quality web design should be a top priority for your company.

While there are more marketing initiatives available than ever before, many of them lead straight back to your website. A quality web design is an essential part of any marketing funnel concerning a customer’s journey. There are many different metrics to measure a web design’s quality, including:

Customer Impression

In today’s multi-channel world, your website is likely not the customer’s first impression of your brand, but it is likely to be one of the most important. With customers researching their purchases more than ever, your web design will likely leave a lasting impression, especially if you have a poor web design or functionality.

Brand Consistency

As a significant touchpoint within a customer’s journey, your website is an incredible platform to promote your brand image and messages. With a design that reflects your other marketing efforts, users will know they are in the right place and are likely to find the content they want. Without a strong brand identity represented on your website, they are much more likely to leave without moving through the appropriate steps of your marketing funnel.

SEO Strategy

While SEO strategy can be a complex process to manage and perfect, your website is the hub of all SEO initiatives. By having a consistent and well-defined SEO strategy, your website will perform better on search engines and appear in front of more potential customers who may not be searching for you by name.

Customer Service

Your website is essentially a service that you offer to your customers, even if you don’t provide direct customer service through your website. By creating an efficient and attractive web design, your customers will have an easier time determining what they are looking for, finding it, and ultimately making a purchase decision. A quality web design can actually lead to a considerably higher conversion rate by eliminating friction in their process through your marketing funnel. In fact, 75% of customers say they make a snap decision on whether to utilize your products and services in snap decisions based on your website. More importantly, if they decide you are not a quality option, they are highly likely to visit one of your competitors on their next stop online.

 

Web Design Functionality

A functional website is just as crucial as a good-looking website. Without critical functionality, a customer is likely to become frustrated and possibly leave the site before finding the content or information they are looking for. Beginning a web design with functionality in mind is key. There are several critical factors at play for ensuring a complete web design that is user-friendly:

Navigation

Without a thought-out plan for navigating your website, it can often become a tangled mess for a customer to navigate. As one of the most important aspects of web design, navigation is essential for creating the rest of your website. Customer journeys, landing pages, navigation headers, sidebars, and internal links all come into play when considering how a potential customer can convert into a paying customer. As a rule of thumb, completing a customer’s journey within three pages is critical to keeping them within your website and preventing them from moving to a competitor’s website.

Responsive Design

Responsive design refers to how your web design will react on multiple devices, differing window sizes, and all the varying browsers that are now available. With mobile traffic accounting for over 55% of all website traffic, having a mobile-friendly web design from the ground up is critical.

Call To Action Buttons

Call to action buttons are a cornerstone of your web design. These are used to guide your potential customers to the pages you wish them to see and give them a quick route through your website to conversion pages. Too many, and there is little telling where your customer will end up. Too few, and they may not see the content they want.

Page Load Speed

The first five seconds of loading time are essential to your website’s performance. Within those first five seconds, the average conversion rate drops by 4.42% for every second a potential customer waits. Nearly 70% of users claim page loading times impact their likelihood to purchase from your website.

Choosing a Web Design Company

Unless you want to be tangled in producing your website, you will likely choose an outside company to create your website for you. Obviously, choosing who builds your website is a vital part of the process. While there are as many types of web design agencies as there are colors in the rainbow, choosing one that fits your needs is essential to getting the best web design for your company. When selecting the right company to design your website, there are several key factors to consider.

Choose a Web Design company that:

• Listens to your ideas
• Brings new ideas to the table
• Has an experienced marketing team
• Has a quality portfolio of previous work
• Has a long, proven track record
• Keeps up with design trends
• Establishes goals
• Has metrics in place for gauging success
• You trust

How Red Crow Can Help

As a well-established marketing agency, Red Crow Marketing can create a quality and functional web design for your company. With a proven track record of nearly two decades, we have seen trends come and go and have created successful web designs for clients large and small. Contact us today to discover how we can help create a lasting design that will help elevate and separate your online presence.