The Ultimate Guide to High-converting Website Design and Development Strategy for 2021
Discover the key components of a high-converting web design strategy and explore the comprehensive roadmap to developing a website that captivates, engages, and converts your target audiences faster than you can serve them.
So, you have decided to launch your website?
You have a brilliant product or service idea; you have identified profitable audiences interested in your offering; now, it’s time to make the big splash on the internet.
You want to launch a website that will help you reach a maximum number of people and bring you, customers, from everywhere. Or, perhaps you are just looking for a website redesign.
And, you have great ideas about what your new website should look like. You want it to be beautiful, modern, and attractive. It should sing praises about your company, your products, and your services. At least, that’s how most entrepreneurs imagine their first website.
Well, it’s time to burst your bubble – website plans like these are a surefire way to run your business aground!
Here’s one rule about website design that you must never forget: the best website design is not one that impresses you; it’s the one that delights your customer.
Every word, every line, and every design element on your website should be tailored and focused on realizing only one goal: fulfilling the needs of your customers. Nothing else.
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This comprehensive guide will help you identify the common website design pitfalls, success strategies, and steps involved in the design and development of a high-converting website.
1. Let Your Audience Guide You
The objective of your website is to engage and delight your target audiences and inspire them to take action – be it a purchase, a form submission, a callback request, or something else.
Your audiences will take such action when they realize that you understand their pain points and your solution can solve them. But, how do you convince your visitors that your solution is effective when you’ve never met the visitor before?
You need a strong understanding of the needs of your visitors – not just the functional needs but also the emotional needs. Try to identify the emotional need your product or service is intended to fulfill.
Also, consider the possibility that your offering may satisfy more than one emotional need, and therefore, you could be targeting multiple target groups with different emotional needs.
To help guide your web design process, you can reduce your target groups into relatable personas. Once you do it, it’ll be easier for you to design the website and optimize it for each persona.
Picture this. Your customer arrives on your website looking to buy a bottle of fine wine. However, all they find is your website talking about your winery, its history, your sourcing methods, and so on. They neither find the purchase options nor the product they are looking for quickly. What do they do? They just close the page and move to your competitor.
If you don’t want that to happen to you, you must understand what your visitors expect from your site when they arrive, and give them precisely that. Take a no-nonsense approach to website development.
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2. Branding
Your website is an extension of your brand. The text content, images, videos, and everything else you put on your website must reinforce your branding, and drive consistent messaging into the minds of your visitors.
An effective custom website design makes creative use of your brand’s colors, fonts, layouts, shapes, spacing, videos, images, icons, and other design elements. Also, these design elements must be consistent across all your website’s pages, your marketing campaigns, and other communications with your audiences, including the offline kind.
Your audiences must know that they are interacting with the same brand, no matter where they see you. Consistent branding across all channels – be it offline or online – ensures that. Therefore, you need highly skilled website designers to make creative use of your branding elements and create immersive digital experiences.
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3. Competitor Analysis
Make a list of your closest competitors and check out what they are doing. Every industry is different. Customers of one industry often behave very differently from those in another industry. So, check out your competitors’ websites and analyze them to understand what’s working for them.
There are plenty of tools available to help you in your efforts. Online services like SEMrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, and others allow you to analyze your competitors’ websites and understand what’s working and what’s not on their site. These tools will provide you granular level insights into the competition – which pages are attracting driving traffic, which keywords are working for them, page-wise conversion rate, and so on.
You can use the findings of your research to guide your web design process. However, bear in mind that these tools are not accurate, and offer only estimates of the traffic data. So, don’t make every web design decision based on their reports. Instead, consider them as reasonably reliable advice.
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4. Mobile-first Approach
And no. It’s not enough anymore to build a website that’s merely compatible with mobile devices.
In 2015, mobile searches took over desktop searches for the first time. It’s been six years since then, during which time, mobile searches far outnumber desktop searches.
Embracing this trend, Google has completely shifted to a mobile-first strategy. The crux of this new strategy is that websites that are designed primarily for mobile users get better search engine traction. In other words, mobile sites get more visibility than desktop websites.
So, take time to understand how mobile users use websites, and design the website to give them an experience that they desire. Also, it’s important to choose a website development company that has the skills and expertise to create mobile-first websites.
5. Make It Lightweight and Fast
40% of internet users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A 1-second delay in loading time results in an annual loss of $1.6 billion in sales for Amazon.
These numbers are shocking but also illuminating for businesses. Consumers have grown accustomed to the fast, responsive, and delightful experiences offered by cutting-edge social media platforms.
They expect – no, demand – that all websites they visit offer similar experiences. If they don’t, then they move on to their competitors. So, here are some tips for businesses to create websites that load faster:
· Reduce HTTP requests
· Use content delivery networks
· Embed YouTube links to your videos instead of directly uploading them on your website
· Compress and optimize all images to manageable sizes
· Minimize the use of CSS
· Reduce 301 redirects
· Remove unused scripts and files
· Take advantage of browser caches
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6. Choose the Right Website Design and Development Technology
There are innumerable ways to design and develop websites. You can use drag-and-drop website builders like Wix; content management systems like WordPress; e-commerce website builders like Magento; a programming language like PHP; or development frameworks like Angular.
Each of these options come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages.
Drag-and-drop website platforms like Wix, or even Shopify for e-commerce businesses, offer the highest degree of ease. You can create your new website in a matter of minutes. However, they severely limit your ability to customize your website.
Content management systems like WordPress and Joomla offer you a higher degree of flexibility when it comes to website design. You can use templates (free or premium) to create your website with minimum effort. You will also get plenty of plugins and addons to give your website additional features like a shopping cart, contact forms, website analytics tracking, and so on.
Creating a website from scratch using a programming language gives you the highest degree of freedom. However, it’s also a labor-intensive and expensive method of website development.
Website development frameworks combine the extreme flexibility offered by programming development and the ease of development promised by content management systems. Choosing the right website development platform can help you achieve several business objectives. For instance, cross-platform development frameworks allow you to develop a website and then transform it into a mobile app for iOS and Android platforms with minimum effort.
A good website design and development agency can guide you in choosing the right website development method.
7. Budget
Of course, your budget plays a critical role in your website development project. Your choice of website development method, backend technologies, number of pages, features, and so on, impact the cost of website development.
You can outsource your website development project to another country like Ukraine, Argentina, India, or Brazil, but outsourcing decisions come with a multitude of problems. Communication issues, unreliable support, cultural differences, legal difficulties, and other challenges can cause unforeseen delays, or in the worse cases, derail the project entirely.
Therefore, businesses of all sizes rely on local website design and development agencies to help them shine in the virtual world.
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8. Content Marketing
How do you ensure that new internet users find your website when they need your product or service? Say, how do you make sure your website pops up in searches when users look for ‘web developer near me,’ ‘web designers near me,’ ‘website developer near me,’ or ‘website designer near me.’
One way to go about it is by investing in Google Ads. However, spending on ads every time you need customers is not a cost-effective method of doing business. A more robust, and long-term strategy is to invest in search engine optimization. Search engine optimization helps you attract highly relevant audiences consistently over a longer period without spending on advertisements.
Once they arrive on your website, it’s important that you offer them useful, engaging, and relevant content that keeps them hooked to your website. Together, SEO and content publishing go hand in hand, and therefore a comprehensive content marketing strategy is what is needed to maximize the benefits you get out of SEO and content strategy.
Here’s a quick list of things you must do as part of your content marketing efforts:
· Create a content calendar for publishing fresh, useful, and relevant content for your audiences
· Make a list of content types that you plan to create and publish – blogs, pillar articles, YouTube videos, and more
· Appoint capable team members for creating and publishing the content. Or, hire a digital agency that can do this for you
· Identify the primary channels where you plan to publish your content – your website, social profiles, third-party websites for guest posting, media outlets, and so on.
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9. Give Specific Instructions and Visual Cues
Your website visitors arrive on the site looking for a solution to a specific problem that your product or service solves. Your website must show them the solution and give them specific instructions on how to get it.
Clear calls to action like Buy Now, Sign Up, Subscribe Today, Call Us, Consult Us, Schedule an Appointment, and so on, tell your visitors what’s the next step. Guide your visitors on the purchase journey and make the journey short, smooth, and delightful for them.
Do some research into how ideal target audiences perform research and purchase decisions. This will help you tailor your website to maximize conversions.
10. Employ Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is the hottest trend in the digital world. Today, consumers expect to have normal conversations with brands. For them, shopping is more than a means to get a product or service; it’s the experience that matters to them.
82% of the consumers rate quick responses to their queries as very important when interacting with a brand. For this reason, 80% of businesses are expected to deploy at least some form of automated conversational marketing systems (chatbots) to cater to their audiences.
Most important of all, businesses that have deployed automated conversational marketing have witnessed a 10% increase in their revenues.
Looking at these facts, it’s clear where digital marketing is going. Businesses must engage, entertain, and converse with their target audiences without making them wait for long. For now, that translates to chatbots. Whether your business requires a simple rule-based chatbot or a more complex AI Chatbot is a decision that depends on your customers, their needs, and the purpose of the chatbot.
Also, there are many ways to develop powerful chatbots that will help your business maximize its conversions. In fact, there are numerous chatbot platforms that allow you to create and deploy a chatbot of your own in a matter of hours.
These are the most important elements of every high-converting website. Consider these factors carefully and work with your website development agency to develop a comprehensive plan to achieve maximum impact with your website.
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