To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it, all modern businesses are expected to maintain a web presence. It’s just good sense to invest in digital platforms for your business, regardless of whether you’re operating a retail store or are a service provider. Consumers are doing an increasing amount of their preliminary research online when it comes to commencing on their buyer’s journey, so developing a website is paramount for companies looking to enjoy longevity in the digital age.
But developing a business website is not an entirely easy process. Modern business owners are expected to equip themselves with a strong understanding of their business’ goals before embarking on their own web development project. Outlining what purpose and functions you’d like your business’ website to offer its existing and prospective client base, is key to ensuring that your investments into web development are all well-informed and thus, positioned to deliver the strongest results.
Today, we’ll be taking a closer look at the art and science behind business website development, touching on everything from colour theory to content strategizing.
The psychology of branding
It’s important to keep in mind that your business website is just as much a promotional tool as it is a valuable asset with the potential to expand on your company revenue stream. As is the case with any promotional materials, you’ll want to make sure that your website is designed to be appealing to your defined target audience. Consider the demographic you’re looking to connect with online, and how best to not only grab but also hold their attention.
The coloring and imagery behind your business branding can always be a great place to start here. As we mentioned briefly, color psychology can play a major yet still surprisingly subliminal role in capturing the attention of your target demographic online. For example, a home spa and wellness company is unlikely to use energetic colors like red, orange, and yellow in their company branding. Contrastingly, businesses operating in fast food, children’s toys, sports, and other market niches that may thrive on energy and action, will be likely to use a warmer colur scheme.
In this regard, the color scheme and other stylistic elements of your website such as fonts and imagery used, can communicate to your audience just what they can expect from their user experience on your website, and whether or not your business is the right fit for them as a consumer.
Formatting and wireframing
Once you have the branding of your business website down, it’s time to take a look at your site’s UI (or ‘user interface’) and how to optimise it so it can deliver the most intuitive user experiences for your site visitors. This process of formatting your website is achieved through first developing a wireframe for your website.
Knowing how to create a website wireframe is an invaluable skill for all modern UI/UX designers, as a wireframe is considered to be a foundational element of any great user journey. The reason for this is that your wireframe should ideally map out your site’s user journey from start to finish, outlining all the pages of your site and what order you’d ideally like your site visitor to interact with these pages.
eCommerce websites provide an easy example here, as a user’s experience will naturally move from browsing through a digital store, to assessing their virtual shopping cart, before finalising their purchase. Taking steps to ensure that your website flows seamlessly from each step on your defined user journey can help encourage site visitors to stay on that journey from start to finish. And as for observations where site visitors drop off the customer journey, that’s where connected processes like abandoned cart retrieval communications in the form of notifications, marketing emails, or even targeted digital ads can come into play.
The relationship between content and intent
Content is simultaneously considered to be the ‘most important, least important’ element of designing any business website. The reason for this is that having content on your website will help ensure that your site catches the attention of search engines. Google’s site crawlers take into consideration the volume of content on a website and the relevance of that content to your site’s industry niche when determining whether or not to present you as an authority in Google search results.
Because of this, the quality of the content on your business website can actually be a major factor in your site’s visibility online. With this in mind, it definitely pays to make sure that your website’s content is purpose-driven and offers value to your site visitors, rather than just being there to fill up otherwise empty space.
A great method for maintaining purpose behind your content is to consider the user intent behind keywords that relate to your business. For example, if one of your customers is searching where they should ‘buy Christmas lights’ on Google, then it’s safe to assume that they’re actively looking to purchase, which means that that user has a transactional intent. By having identified the user intent behind a search phrase, you can then build a page on your website that targets this keyword and make sure that the page itself can fulfil your user’s intent. So in this example, the web page will actually list Christmas lights for sale.
Mastering functional design
By combining all the elements we’ve outlined above, you can make sure that your business website is in the strongest possible position to be not only a joy for site visitors to interact with, but perhaps also the authority in your market niche.
Just be sure to keep in mind that business website development is by no means a linear process. Mastering the art of functionality in website design is truly an ongoing endeavour, simply because emerging technologies means that features and functionalities of modern websites are always changing. For this reason, business owners are encouraged to consistently revisit their site layout, formatting, and design to ensure that their websites never feel stale or fall behind the curve when it comes to innovation.
Remember that developing an exceptional business website is a marathon in and of itself rather than a sprint. Be prepared to stay fresh and innovative so that you can consistently be a strong and welcome presence online.
