Straight talk – The Do This, Get That Guide on Web Design

How is web design done right? A site that is designed right, is user-friendly and high converting. Condensing web design requirements to these two aspects of user experience and high conversion, isn’t that so limited? Well, we’ll concede a third aspect and that is SEO-friendly.

And believe us all web site design criteria stem from these three bases.

How? You will soon find out.

Let’s see what makes a website user friendly?

Easy to find relevant content is key. A crucial element of corporate marketing, web design cannot but focus on its core function of representing the business. All content needs to be relevant and organized in a manner that visitors can find easily what they are looking for; whether for information, education, online research about the business’ activities or looking to contact or even purchase from the company.

On the flip side, if your content is either not relevant or poorly organized, you are bound to disenchant visitors and lose potential customers. Do you want to?

Fresh and up to date content bring back visitors while gaining new visitors to the website. Why would more and more visitors come to your site, unless they know they will find fresh and valuable content that is current and relevant? That gives you an opportunity to re-engage with old visitors and attract new visitors too. So, what are we waiting for, just do it.

Speed and reliability of the website are paramount for great user experience. If anyone tries to visit your website and it is either not accessible or opens rather slow, frustrating the visitor, what does it say about user experience?  Likewise, if a website visitor tries to access your website using a mobile phone and your website either does not render with user friendly controls for the phone interface, what happens? All these are poor user experience and spell the doom for your website’s popularity and reach. Ensure you build a responsive site and host with a reliable hosting provider. No, compromise here.

Security of the website goes a long way in establishing trust. What if someone is trying to access your website and encounters (put in a bad site warning message picture here) this? Not only you lose trust, the poor user experience does not let the customer revisit your site. Do not allow this on your website. Building trust is paramount for your business.

Let’s get the traffic and then worry about conversion, should we?

Search Engine Optimization is a one the most effective tools in the arsenal of internet marketing. Yes, it is a kind of digital advertising. And it starts with optimizing the web site for searches. In order to do this, you need to make friends with the search engines; help them find your website, like your website, understand you and recognize you for your knowledge and mettle.

How do you do this?

When a website is built, make sure it has all the wherewithal for on-page optimization. SEO friendly content organizing, markup and meta-data. Search engine optimization starts with keyword research for optimum traffic vis-à-vis competition. Here are the key points to check and implement on-page SEO.

• Use the right key words in your title and description
• Make content, both text or graphics understood by search engines for relevancy
• Content is checked for grammar and duplicate copy
• URLs are clean and SEO friendly
• Implement schema to structure data for representation in SERPs
• Maintain 1-3% keyword density on the web page
• Organize content for readability with headings, styling, bullets and numbering
• Optimize images, use the keywords in alt text and file names and geo tag images’
• Likewise for videos used on your site
• Optimize code and graphics for speed
• Implement robots.txt to instruct search engines to crawl and index webpages
• Implement site map for search engine efficiency in indexing the website
• URL redirection and rewrite stop from missing opportunities to reach your website
• Implement internal and outbound links and strengthen authority and trust
• Implement SSL certificate to build trust with both; visitors and search engines
• Use social sharing buttons as well as social profile links

With SEO features in place, your website secures a solid foundation for success on the web. As search engines understand your site, recognize its authority and trust worthiness, find traffic arriving and visitors engaging with your content, they confer a higher and higher rank to your website. Higher rank translates to more traffic and the mutually rewarding cycle continues. At this stage the website is poised for off-page optimization and outstanding success with traffic and the rank. If required you may also decide to secure some paid traffic depending on the speed with which you want to move and expend. You are in control. What more could a business want?

Now that we have traffic, let’s focus on conversion

Traffic is the stepping stone but not the ultimate step to success. What spells success is conversion. You want visitors converting to leads, followers, subscribers, customers and referrals depending on where in the sales funnel you are.

Implementing engaging content is key. What to do? This is not a definitive list. But here’s some ideas.

What not to do?

As Lee Erney aka drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket says…’’NOBODY CARES ABOUT HOW GREAT YOU THINK YOU ARE… YOU JACKWAGON’’

What your prospects care about is their problem and how you are going to solve it. They care about themselves.

A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a million!

Make sure your web design company has the creative flair for graphic design in advertising and marketing. That they can create and implement great branded videos to tell your story and make your mark.

Conversion does not stop at just great copy. Capturing leads and making it easy for website visitors to contact you or leave their contact information for you is key. Strong lead gen capture features make for one of the most effective components on your website.

Good luck with your search for the right web development company.

ReignSearch offers consulting and marketing services in the digital space. With focus on inbound marketing with a combination of tools and tactics. ReignSearch offers high converting, functional and attractive web design services in Toronto at an extremely reasonable price. We say reasonable, as the potential for profitability that is packed in its web design is far greater than the price it may charge as a Web Development Toronto Company.

Want to speak with ReignSearch? Contact us here.