Website Design

Local Business Website Design – Key Design Elements

There are all kinds of statistics out there about your website design and your website performance but for you as a local business owner there are some basic rules to follow:

• It needs to load quickly – you have 3 to 5 seconds to make the right impression. So a slow loading website is already giving the wrong impression about your brand.
• Your home page should immediately tell them they are in the ‘right place’. With an image or video to show what you do. Your 5 Star reviews (testimonials), your case studies, and your accreditations. This tells your potential visitor they are in the right place (picture/video), with a company qualified to deliver (accreditations), that have raving fans (5 Star reviews), and examples of the type of work or goods you provide (case studies).
• Has to be mobile optimised – more searches are carried out on mobile devices such as mobile phones and ipads than on desktop devices. As of April 2015 Google may penalise your website for not giving the user the best experience.
• You must have your contact details and business details prominent all over your website – You wouldn’t believe the number of times we review a website and point out to the business that their telephone number isn’t clear or the address of their business isn’t prominent. Remember – people using Google search are searching for your business in the same way that years ago we used Yellow Pages … to get a telephone number and call for a quote!

These are the fundamentals you need in place. So that when you drive customers to your website to maximise your potential to turn a visitor into a customer.

Why Getting Your Website Design Basics Right Works

As business owners we all spend money to drive more potential customers to our business and online that means your website. But driving traffic to your website costs time and money, whether that’s seo, via your Facebook page, Yell.com, etc;. So having spent that time or money to get them to your website. Converting a visitor into a customer is important.

Why? Well apart from having a new customer. The business that converts more visitors into customers can afford to spend more money on getting the traffic!

For example. If you were paying £1 per click on Google Adwords and for every 20 clicks one of these visitors became a customer or client. In other words it cost you £20 for a new customer.

Meanwhile your competition are spending the same £1 per click. But only convert 1 in 40 so it costs them £40 to acquire a new customer. Meaning you could spend twice as much as them getting twice the results. So designing a website that converts is the most important function of the website design.

Marketing Your Website – FREE!

If you buy a website and do nothing … you have just purchased a very expensive business card.