How to improve a website design’s outcome

Have you noticed how some websites you visit are a pleasure to use, and others seem intent on making life as difficult as possible? Hard to find products, unclear instruction as to where to input the promo code or websites that take so long to load you lose the will to live? A website design should instil a sense of trust and confidence in the user and help them get from A to B with minimum effort, but many fall short. 

A business website design is more than digital pages sharing the details of the products and services on offer. It’s an opportunity to excite, inspire and connect with people who want to spend their money, but to get them to put their hands in their pockets requires time, energy and resources – the bare minimum does not unleash the website’s full potential. If your website is not performing as it should, it’s time to take a step back to review and assess what’s going on.

Roll back to business basics

Before you address the underperformance of a website, it’s time to rediscover what the business means to your customers and vice versa. Forget about the technical aspects of a website design for a minute, let’s focus on the human aspects of the business.

• Who is your target audience? Identify who your ideal customers are. What are their needs, goals and behaviours? How can you help users interact with the website on their journey from landing to conversion?

Now consider your business’s goals and how the website can help you achieve them. For a website to be a success it needs to have a clear purpose:

• What are the business objectives for the website? Is it to increase sales or generate leads? Once your objectives have been thrashed out, you can identify the specific key metrics to measure to track the success of the website, whether it be page views or conversion rates etc.
• What are the website design objectives? Which specific design objectives align with the business objectives? Do you need an improved user experience or elements to encourage user interaction and engagement?

10 Steps to improve a website design

The answers to the above questions should always inform the strategic decisions you make with respect to the website design and the content you publish – vital information that is key to understanding what makes your business tick, and to unlocking the website’s full potential.

Share your findings with your professional web designer. This level of detail fuels the success of Digital Presence’s website designs, especially for the small business website design packages. By intimately understanding a business, our website design Christchurch team maximises a site’s outcome by:

1. Taking a user-centred approach: Focusing on user needs, goals and behaviour to create a design to meet visitor expectations.
2. Developing a mobile-responsive website design: Ensuring the website is optimised to view on different devices and screen sizes.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimising the website to help search engines understand what the website is about. SEO improves its ranking and visibility in the search results pages.
4. Creating clear and concise content: Keeping text and images simple, to-the-point, and easy to read.
5. Straightforward navigation: Making it easy for users to find what they are looking for with intuitive navigation.
6. Fast loading speed: Ensuring the website loads quickly to avoid frustrating users.
7. Visually appealing design: Using colour, typography, and imagery to create an attractive, professional look. Utilising white space effectively to strengthen visuals.
8. Consistent branding: Incorporating company branding into the web design to strengthen brand identity.
9. Accessibility: Ensuring the website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
10. Analytics: Using data from website analytics to continually improve the design and user experience.

Understand and utilise storytelling

Human connection is crucial to the outcome and success of your website design – exploit those emotions and the human connection and you trigger sales. An emotional connection fuels how people perceive and relate to your brand and products, and is the main influence in buying decisions (even above and beyond the price and value).

Websites are memorable when they provoke an emotional reaction– not a strong outpouring of emotion such as bursting into tears or guffaws of laughter, but the more subtle response of human connection. Think of the best business website designs you have come across. The fact you remember them is a marker of their success achieved through visual design but also through relatable quality storytelling.

What do we mean by storytelling in digital marketing?

Once upon a time there was a business looking for a team of the best Christchurch web designers….

Storytelling in digital marketing is different to traditional storytelling. It’s about using strategic narratives to communicate the brand’s mission and message to a targeted audience which creates the all-important emotional connection. Unlike traditional marketing tactics such as sales pitches or an image or list of product features, digital marketeers use storytelling to develop a sense of need for the products through compelling content that speaks to the reader directly – recognising their personal needs and motivations while delivering a solution.

Content marketing

Content marketing is fuelled by storytelling – SEO website content, blog posts, video production, and through social media. A robust content marketing strategy shows the potential consumer the bigger picture. Consider traditional marketing methods as a solitary stitch on a tapestry and compare with content marketing which shows you the stitch in the context of the completed embroidery. Publish content to entertain, educate and inspire in relation to lived experience.

Brand identity

Storytelling is how you can define, strengthen, and communicate your brand’s identity, weaving its values and mission into the brand’s identity. Use storytelling to strengthen the brand identity and distinguish and differentiate it from competitors. Create a persona for your business as if it were a human – it sounds wacky, but it helps to maintain a consistent and reliable brand voice to establish credibility and authority.

Emotional connection

The internet has made communicating and connecting with others easier than ever before, yet somehow, we’ve never been so disconnected. People need people; we’re tribal, continually seeking out others who are like us and share our values. This isn’t restricted to social interactions but business transactions too, and the driver is an innate emotional desire to find our people. There are several ways to use storytelling to connect with the audience, consider:

• Customer testimonials and social proof - highly relatable to potential customers and triggers the tribal instincts of PLU (people like us) and as you know monkey see, monkey do.
• Website content – use the words on the website to create a sense of urgency: a strong call-to-action, limited time offers, exclusive online deals for while stock lasts are hugely emotive and effective at encouraging consumers to take action right now. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a real psychological phenomenon and highly effective for boosting sales.
• Videos of you and the team – you are not a faceless corporate entity.
• An About Us page – explain the history of the business, mission and motivations, your business is more than a dollar generating machine, you care.
• Promote user-generated content – authentic customers’ experiences are golden, share them on your website, across email campaigns and on social media.
• Case studies – publishing proof of how the standalone transforms into XYZ is incredibly powerful because it shows the possibilities of what can be achieved. 

The best website designs bridge technical excellence with the human connection and experience. Digital Presence delivers the whole package. Using harvested data to shape and direct tweaks and adjustments throughout the lifetime of the website, a Digital Presence website design is agile to the demands of the users and Google algorithms alike – without you needing to lift a finger: stress free, jargon free and effort free. Not sure how to write website content to connect with potential customers? We’ve got it covered. If you would like to learn more about how we can improve your website design, drop us a line or call 0274 278047.