When you’re a professional, you need to look professional. Everything your business does – from the interior design at your location, to the manner in which you and your employees conduct yourselves – should show that you care about offering your customers value. Your professionalism (combined with effective branding) should help you stand out from the crowd.
You should aim to be equally professional when it comes to your website. Nowadays businesses are able to effectively brand themselves online. Your website is the hub of your business’s online presence and it should be a good representation of what your company is about. With local SEO and online marketing largely taking over traditional advertising, your website deserves to be treated like your ultimate customer building platform – after all, that’s exactly what it should be.
If your website isn’t up to scratch now is an excellent time to improve it. Having a professional website design by next year could do wonders for your business in 2017! But you know it’s possible to set up a website without having it designed professionally. So what are the benefits of having a website professionally designed?
Stand Out From The Crowd
A custom designed website can reflect the customer experience you aim to provide off-line more accurately. Branding is a integral part success because proper branding makes your company more memorable while also showcasing professionalism. If you’ve already built a steady brand off-line, you should aim to follow through with your image online.
Working with a professional website designer helps you craft something to feel proud of. On top of this, your website will be completely unique, which will make it more memorable to your visitors.
First Impressions Matter
It might seem like an obvious statement – but a professionally designed website really does look more professional. When a website is professionally designed, everything looks visually connected and fonts are all easily readable. Designers know how to connect visual elements to create a page that looks appealing as a whole. It doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to do, especially not if you’re creative. But to design a website that looks good, you’ll have to combine creativity with some serious tech savvy.
Looks Aren’t Everything
Website design isn’t just about building a website that looks good. Professional designers aim to strike a careful balance between pages that load fast and a beautiful design. A sluggish website will put off potential customers and will negatively affect your SEO. Designing something that’s aesthetically pleasing, user friendly and SEO optimized requires experience.
Better Performance Checklist
Your website should attract clients, but if the design is lousy, it’ll fail miserably at doing that. For a website design to be good, it must fulfill some requirements:
- Your design must be responsive. This means it should load quickly and look presentable when viewed on any device. Responsive design is important for both your website SEO and customer experience.
- User friendliness is a must. To convert website visitors to customers, your website should have intuitive navigation. Pages on your main menu should be named appropriately and your menu structure should be properly planned. Your menu should also be easy to read and it shouldn’t be in an obscure where visitors won’t see it.
- Aim for proper coding. For your website to convert visitors to customers, everything should work properly. Broken contact forms or links (and other bad coding) will bring even the best online marketing strategy to its knees.
If you hire a professional web designer, all the basics will be taken care of. That’s good news because small technical details can be a disaster to work with yourself. Getting everything on your website to look nice without sacrificing usability is important is good website design.
Chattanooga Website Design
Clearly a professionally designed website is great for business. Intuitive navigation and professional appearance (combined with a responsive design that’s SEO optimized) will allow prospective customers to easily find your business and get in touch.
Even though maintaining a solid online presence is hard work, it’s an incredible opportunity to reach customers that would never have heard of your business any other way. More and more, people are starting to use search engines to find products and services. The only way to reach that audience is through Internet marketing.
On the Internet, your website is your most vital online marketing asset. It’s the only place online where you don’t have to compete for attention from your customers. While social media is useful, you constantly have to compete with other content on social platforms, making it difficult to convert prospects to paying customers.
That’s why smart businesses aim to lead traffic from social media to their websites – where they’ll have their customer’s undivided attention. Only once visitors are on your website, will you have a decent opportunity to sell them on your product or service. Because of this, professional design is a good long-term investment. Once your website design is effectively converting visitors to customers, you probably won’t have to change it for a few years.
So, do you want to improve your website so you’ll reach more customers next year? Are you ready to harness the power of online marketing for your business? At Serious SEM, we specialize in website design and digital marketing for small to medium sized businesses. We help our customers obtain online marketing success. Our main priority is helping businesses in Tennessee with local SEO and website design, but we can serve businesses anywhere in the States.