Almost every company these days has a website — whether it’s a restaurant, a retail chain, or a corporation, having a website is almost a requirement in today’s day and age. It’s one of the first places consumers stop when researching products or services and where they gauge how well your services or products fit with what they’re looking for. Chances are if you don’t have a website, you’ll end up getting passed by in favor of a company that has easily accessible information. However, even if you do have a website, you might want to start considering hiring web design professionals to cast their expert eye over your site. Good web development is key to sales and marketing and their suggestions could help make your website more attractive to prospective customers and draw in more traffic — and thereby, more business. Web design professionals have a whole arsenal of tips and tricks that will make you look polished, professional, and a company customers will want to do business with.
What Do Consumers Look For In a Website?
- Clean Aesthetic
- Accessible
- Mobile Compatible
- Social Media Links
Web designers will tell you that a clean aesthetic is key. As many website designers have found, online consumers aren’t really reading, they’re skimming. Chances are if you have a big wall of text as the first thing customers see, their eyes are likely to glaze over and they’ll move on if they can’t find the important information they’re looking for by a quick skim. Those who are browsing the Internet for some quick information will read only about 30% of the content on a page. You want to make a good first impression — especially considering that you have about 10 seconds to make any kind of impression on your customer. After that (and often before those 10 seconds are up), they’ll lose interest and move on if nothing grabs them.
Going along with consumers’ short attention spans, you want your website layout to make sense. Web design professionals can help you design a website that makes the most sense to the customer — whether it’s a tab based layout, a more visual layout with pictures that link to content, or a clean main page with more text based pages off of that, it’ll make your website more organized. Bulleted lists are a good way to make information seem more accessible — there’s more visual space between the words so the reader feels less daunted. A survey found that around 70% of people were more willing to look at bullet point lists than lists that weren’t bulleted.
This is perhaps one of the biggest ways that older websites need to be updated. Web design professionals will tell you that with the rise of tablets and mobile devices that can access the Internet, a high amount of Internet traffic is generated through mobile devices. If your website doesn’t work well on those devices, your chances are reduced that they’ll stick around to navigate it and you’ll lose their business.
If you’re convinced that it’s not important, think again. Four out of five consumers shop using their smartphones — it’s so convenient to browse while standing in line, waiting in the parking lot, or pretty much anywhere! And Internet users aren’t the most patient — they’ll easily hop to the next business that sells comparable items or services with a mobile compatible website, rather than try and make your business work, even if it’s better than the rest.
With over 100 billion searches done on the Internet globally every month, it can feel overwhelming to connect with customers. But social media is a great way to stay inn touch with your customer base. Over 25 million pieces of content get shared every day and over 60^ of millenials stay updated on brands using social media. Almost 50% of millenials rely on social media for advice, deals, and scam warnings when they buy online. Having a good social media profile can help you connect to your clients and expand the customer base further.
