What is Your Website’s Job?
Many people think of web design only in visual terms. They picture the images, the videos, the buttons, the colors, the headlines, and the copy that appears on the screen.
But web design really encompasses everything that creates the user experience–both on the screen and behind the scenes. And when that experience attracts the right people at the right time, gives them the information they need, and moves them towards a buying decision, good web design can drive business results.
That’s the website’s job–and your creative agency’s responsibility–to drive business results. Here’s how the top web designers get that done.
Web Design Best Practices
For your website to be a business tool, it has to attract the right people at the right time in their customer journey. Creative agencies can draw these visitors to your website with paid digital advertising campaigns or content marketing on your owned platform–in this case, your website.
That means your content has to be optimized to answer the questions your customers ask at every stage. For many reasons, search engine optimization is best done during the web design process, not retroactively once the site launches. The on-page copy and the back-end meta descriptions and title tags can help your website rank for specific keywords, terms, and frequently asked questions.
Web Design Provides a Positive User Experience (UX)
What do your website visitors need?
Maybe they’re doing research so they can find the right product or service. They could be looking for very specific information about your location, hours, or programs. In either case, a positive user experience helps visitors quickly and easily find what they need.
Why a positive experience matters
When website content delivers value at every stage of the customer journey, it’s more likely to be referenced and shared with others in similar situations. Valuable web content, delivered through a strong UX design establishes the brand as a knowledgeable resource and an industry leader. Reinforcing this identity supports positive referrals as well as the sales and marketing messages that brought each user to the site, initially.
Web Design Helps Customers Complete a Transaction or Capture Information
When potential customers visit your website with the intention of making a purchase or submitting a quote request, they should move through the process as seamlessly as possible. That flow from information to action can be as simple as highlighting the appropriate calls to action on each page. When done right, the user pathway is made easier by high-quality design, focused on the user experience (UX).
Whether or not customers are ready to make a purchase the day they visit your website, your site still has a job to do. The content should engage visitors by delivering the information and insight they need in order to make the best decision possible whenever they’re ready. Simply by being helpful, your website content can bring potential buyers back in the future.
In longer buying cycles, B2B web design allows companies to continue the conversation with prospects by collecting their contact information. Whether through an easy-to-find Quote Request button, a Contact Form, or a Subscribe/Opt-in box, these websites give their companies transparency into the customer journey and they can reveal buyer’s intent, which is valuable when continuing the lead nurturing and sales conversation via email or offline.
Web Design isn’t just building a website. It’s creating an experience
In the end, companies don’t just seek out creative agencies to design a website. They’re looking for a creative agency because they aren’t accomplishing the business goals they set. At some point, many of them make a new hire in a lead marketing role or they see their competitors’ websites and they realize how far behind they’ve fallen. Hiring a creative agency is the first step toward realigning marketing efforts with business goals.
Best Designs recently named Idea Marketing Group one of the country’s top creative agencies, because we understand that good web design means much more than how a website looks.