Would you believe us if we told you that a great website involves far more than bright pops of color and appealing images? Your website it easily your greatest asset when it comes to increasing sales. Therefore, you have to go far beyond the topical layer of your website in order to see results. So what happens when you skimp on your website? It can’t be that bad, right? Wrong. The amount of time, effort and money you put into a website significantly contributes to the amount of traffic, conversions, and sales you gain (or lose).
A poorly designed and developed website is the fastest way to drive a prospective client away from your company. In fact, it is common for greater than 50% of visitors to your site to leave within 15 seconds of their initial arrival. That’s not a lot of time to pique the interest of potential customers. Your website serves as a visual representation of your brand. It defines your credibility, therefore, an effective web design translates to a legitimate business while a poorly designed web design translates to questionable services and business practices.
You Get What You Pay For
Initially, a low price tag for a website design might be appealing, but it will cost you more in the long run. There’s always the potential for hidden or unexpected costs that could drive that initial low price right back up. Additionally, there is always the chance that your “unbeatable deal” of a website turns out so poorly that you require a complete website redesign. The cost of the original site plus redesign now add up to even more than you initially would have paid if you would have done it right the first time.
In the web design and development world, cheap prices almost always mean low levels of expertise and knowledge. That being said, you don’t have to break your bank over the creation of your website. But you should do your research and develop a firm understanding of what average costs are for websites that take your business to the next level. Anything advertised for a considerably lower amount should be a red flag.
Cheap website could cause:
- Call to action buttons that don’t work properly
- Internal or external links that don’t go anywhere
- Repeated website crashes
Furthermore, reputable website creation usually involves an entire team of experts to make a website that can be found easily by your target audience and be as useful as possible when your audience arrives on your site. After all, you don’t want a stellar website that no one can find. Once the designers provide the bells and whistles, the site needs to go places and that is where the rest of the team comes in. Content marketers create exciting, readable content and SEO specialists ensure that the content is properly optimized. This is truly where you get the biggest bang for your buck.
Design For Those Who Give Up Quickly (Which Is The Majority of Audiences)
In a survey, 35% of website users fail to complete even the simplest of tasks on a website. Common hurdles include too much going on, not enough information, text that is too small to read, and a navigation that is too difficult to follow. In order to avoid these hurdles, focus on simplifying your website. Determine what primary task you want your audience to accomplish when arriving at your website and make that the focus.
Make it easy for your current and potential customers to interact with your site. Highlight links that lead to product pages, create downloadable PDFs and allow for appointment scheduling and reservations, as well as comments and shareable information.
Tower’s web developer, Chris says, “The most common [issue] I see is generally poor user experience. Development takes the time to not only build the site but to create a fast, easy-to-use user experience that can be easily managed into the future.”
To make the best user experience possible, take all the guessing out of the game. Ensure that everything is arranged on the page in a way that is easy to navigate and that content is engaging and enticing.
Site Speed Too Slow? Next!
If a potential customer attempts to use your website and notices that the page is loading too slowly, they will ditch your company entirely, taking their business to bigger, faster competitors. It has been found that a whopping 40% of people will abandon a website that takes any longer than three seconds to load. In effect, this contributes to higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. This infographic describes how even a one-second page delay on your company’s website could result in a 7% reduction in conversions, potentially costing your business $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Not only does slow site speed negatively affect your conversions, it also negatively affects your rankings. Google has indicated that one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank web pages.
Responsiveness Is A Must
Responsive Web Design (RWD) ensures optimal viewing and interaction on a variety of devices including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones with the least amount of resizing, panning, and scrolling possible. The layout changes based on the device on which you are accessing a website. From a mobile phone, content appears in single column view, whereas larger screens, such as tablets, show that exact same content in a two column view.
More than half of website searches are done on a mobile device, so if your site lacks responsive web design, you could easily lose a majority of potential customers. In fact, Google’s April 2015 algorithm update, referred to as Mobilegeddon, shows that websites that have RWD across multiple mobile devices are given a boost in ratings. Happy mobile-loving customers? Happy Google? It’s a win-win!
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