With the internet completely entrenched in our lives, a quality corporate website design is vital to the success of just about every business around the world. It’s not just having a website that matters, it’s the design and layout of your website, as well as the content that gives a business the competitive edge it needs to grow and expand.
For many businesses, their website is their first contact with potential customers, so as with many opportunities in our lives, a good first impression is the foundation upon which you can grow your relationship. Make a good first impression and you can gain a converting customer, make a bad first impression and they go elsewhere.
All of this begs the question: what is a good corporate website design?
Three elements of a quality corporate website design
A quality website design gives your visitors what they want, when they want it and in a way that is understandable to them. Simply put, your website needs to solve a problem for your visitors. To do this effectively, your website needs to answer three questions for visitors:
1.“What does this business do?” Whether you sell one or more products or services, your website needs to explain what you do or what you offer, very clearly to your visitors. Have you ever left a website and wondered what in the world they were talking about? Maybe you have searched for something and clicked on one of the links in the search pages, but had no idea why Google selected it?
A clear explanation is vital to not only keeping a visitor on your website long enough to convert, but also to attracting their loyalty as well. This explanation needs to be short and to the point and the very best explanations, are really short. For example, on our home page, we state right at the top of the page that we build high quality websites, manage them for our clients, and improve their visibility in Google. Easy!
2. “Can this business solve my problem?” Do visitors to your website know why your products or services are useful to them? Do they realise that they are designed to solve a specific problem? Just presenting a list of services or products, even listing their features, colours, sizes etc., doesn’t really explain their benefits. Any developer who specialises in creating a quality corporate website design for their clients, should ensure that you have the benefits front and centre on your home page.
For instance, on our home page, we ask the question of whether our visitors are tired low quality work, issues and frustrations that they commonly receive from dirt cheap web developers. Anyone who has had problems with low quality web designers will immediately know that we are talking to them, so we not only explain our benefits, but also qualify customers at the same time.
3. “Do I feel confident about this business?” From an aesthetic point of view, your website needs to appeal visually to your visitors, because if it doesn’t, they often don’t hang around to read your content. Good aesthetics includes not only the layout and colour scheme of your website, but also its user-friendliness and whether its very design makes it easy for visitors to find, read and understand your content.
But it also goes beyond aesthetics. Your website needs to inspire confidence and trust, in the form of reviews, security badges, memberships, licences, awards, and so on. In combination, these elements help your visitors to see that you are who you say you are, and that you’re going to deliver the right outcome for them.
There are many more elements that all come together to create a quality corporate website design, but if you’re gearing it towards your target audience, and what they need to know, you’ll enjoy a much higher rate of enquiries and sales.
