Web Design Cornwall
Web Design is a fascinating area and of great importance to your and every business, both here in Cornwall and further afield.
Unfortunately it means different things to different people, and some of the various approaches will have massively different outcomes for your web site.
Traditionally web design was done by the same people that produced your business cards and leaflets, meaning that in many cases the visual aspect was the only or main consideration. While a pretty web site is without doubt a delightful thing, it may do nothing at all to help promote your business, bring you visitors or help you undertake the process of converting them to long term customers.
You may have read elsewhere on this site that for us the primary consideration of web design is the financial success of our customer, so you will understand that the visual element of web design is of secondary importance.
So what are the other elements of web design - the ones you can't see, but which make the difference between a successful or a failing (lonely) web site?
Web Design #1 - The ability to be found by your potential customers.
Every day there are thousands of people on the net searching for what you do. Google and the other search engines are there to help those people find what they are looking for. Google does this partly by looking for sites where the text on the pages matches the text in the search-phrase. So if your web site says "Welcome to the web site", then you are likely to attract people searching for that. If your page says "click here" then you will attract people searching for that. If your page says "your company name limited" then people who already know your name will find you.
That's no good is it - you want new customers to find you. So the words to use are words which people are actually searching for in Google, who might actually want what you do - but don't know you yet. This is where Keyword research comes in, and without dong that at the start of a project, the designer will have no idea what to write to actually attract visitors to the site.
Web Design #2 - the ability to rank highly in the search engines to increase the numbers of visitors.
A well designed site will typically get 60% to 90% of its visitors through search. So this should be your major priority when designing a site. The things that help you rank highly include:
1. Choice of the search term to rank for. To competitive and it will take a long time to rank. Too little searchers searching for a term and it will be easy to get to No 1. However who cares, because it will bring you no visitors. Selecting the right keywords to rank for is essential. A company like ours could choose the word "web design" to rank for, but in reality that would not bring them the right profile of customers, and achieving a ranking on a national phrase might be difficult. A local phrase like "web design cornwall" might be a much better choice.
2. Having lots of pages full of text on the site. Google ranks pages individually, so the more you have the more traffic your site is likely to get. Adding pages regularly is also essential to keep both users and search engines interested, which is why we prefer using content managed web sites like Joomla and Wordpress wherever possible. You can log in, add a page and save it. Google indexes the page. Visitors come to read it. Easy.
3. Links to your site. Links to your site act as votes of popularity, so the more you have (and the better quality they are), the higher your site will rank. Link building typically happens after the design phase, however we include it here for the sake of completeness. If your web design plan doesn't factor in link building then the site will never attract many visitors.
4. Having the right kind of content. Search engines index words. WORDS! So other forms of content, while pretty, engaging and the rest, will on the whole not bring you visitors. So if your web designer is proposing a "really clean look" just images on the page with plenty of white space around it, just remember that no words = few or no visitors. Flash is another big issue with Internet marketers, as though it can look lovely (wining the designer all kinds of accolades), search engines don't index it very well at all, and it sometimes even scares them away. Occasionally a flash site will have no words on it at all - apart form the domain name and meta perhaps, meaning that there is virtually nothing of the Flash site to be indexed.
Web Design #3 - The ability to convert visitors to customers.
This is another huge subject, but if we were to look at a few of the key points they would be....
1.First impressions count. You have about one second to be interesting enough to keep the visitor on the page. The decision is made mainly on your headline. If you don't have a clear text headline, or it does not contain what the user wants in an attractive format, they will be gone. If the page takes too long to load they will be gone. The headline is SO important!
2. Don't distract your visitors with bewildering backgrounds, fonts, moving messages, irrelevant links etc. Look at Google and Amazon - plain black font on a white background. Easy to read, you turn no-one off, keep everyone on the page.
3. Call to action: Each page should have its own call to action, whether it is a buy now button, a sign up form, a "contact us for more information" or just a "read more" link. Make it clear and easy to follow, try and give an interesting and compelling reason to do so. The old salesman's adage is "don't be afraid to ask for the sale". Neither should your web page be.
4. Credibility: A million people on the web are trying to sell you, scam you, get a hold of your cash. Why should you ne any different? A good way to demonstrate this is with the style and manner of your page, the quality of what you write. If its really useful and interesting then you demonstrate your value to the visitor. If its just a sales pitch, perhaps they;ll run off pretty fast? Testimonials are another great way to establish your credibility - ideally real people with real names and faces, so much the better.
Web Design #4 - Build the brand.
This is the bit that your graphic designer will go mad for. Logos, images, a co-ordinated page that matches your brochure and your corporate Y-fronts. While we can't deny that this is important, it is mostly massively over-egged by designers at the expense of everything else. A pretty web site that matches your company socks is without doubt a delight, and we do love to build them. If you are really building a brand that will be recognised then this must be pursued, without losing site of all the other priorities of web design.
Basic quality is vital too - if its a cheap looking site then how do you rate the quality of the provider? However we won't dwell much in this here, because everyone else would!
Web Design #5 - Invite them back.
Another old sales adage - "It takes 8-10 visits to close the typical sale"
How then do you think your web site will close a sale after only one visit? If you want to turn your visitors into customers you will have to engage with them at a much deeper level, and you can only do this if you invite them back. To invite them you have to capture their details, which they will be happy to give you if you can offer them something sufficiently interesting and compelling for them to do so. Traditionally this would be capturing the email address for high quality email marketing to your subscriber list. Doing this well you will continue to deliver quality information of the type they first came looking for, until you become their natural first port of call for information on the topic. Having achieved this you have established a relationship of trust, perhaps without ever having spoken or met. The step to their buying from you is a small one.
Another good way that is becoming increasingly prevalent is Social Networking. If you can invite the visitor to join one of your networks then you will be engaging with them in the longer term, and have the opportunity to build trust, just as with good email marketing. Social Networking is all the rage right now, as the 200 million Facebook users and massive growth on Twitter will attest. However it is difficult to target your message as well as with email marketing. It is also time consuming to do it well, so many still use email marketing as the primary tool for inviting visitors back to the site.
While the email marketing mechanism or social networking do not have to be part of the web design process in the strictest sense, if you have not factored in this mechanism then you will not be achieving the best possible results from your site. It should be part of your overall web marketing strategy, if not so much part of the site design.
Web Design Summary..
So I hope you get the gist - its not just about how your web site looks! All these factors and more should be factored into your web marketing plan, and a site that does not take into account at least some of these points can never be much of a commercial success.
We do not believe that good design is about pretty - it is about being "fit for purpose", so if you want a popular and successful web site that attracts visitors and customers, there will be a lot more to your web design that what you initially see on the page.
Channel Computing combine SEO, Internet Marketing and web design in Cornwall - for truly effective business web sites.
Please contact us for further details.
