Well-Designed Website “Key to Success”
With all the emphasis on SEO when conversations turn to online marketing and success, it may seem that the appearance and function of the site itself are secondary, but that just isn’t true. There’s still no better marketing tool than a well-designed website. Sure, there’s got to be a strategy to drive traffic to the site, but an unappealing, hard-to-read, hard-to-navigate site will have visitors hitting the Back button.
The goal of the marketing campaign is conversion, the principle of turning a click-through into a customer. SEO, social media outreach, and article and news release distribution are the first stage of the process, bringing potential customers in. The last stage, getting that visitor to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or at least to stay a while looking deeper, depends 100 percent on the design of the site.
So, what is a well-designed site? First, visitors need to be able to find the information they’re looking for. Readability and navigation are the two main ways to facilitate that. All fonts should be legible and text should be formatted nicely, with smaller paragraphs rather than large blocks of text.
Navigation menus should be easily found, with easy to read fonts, and it should be clear to what each menu item links. Floating navigation bars, which stay on the screen as visitors scroll down, have become popular as they’ve become easier to encode. At the very least, a complete set of navigation links should appear at the top of the screen and at the footer. A good sitemap helps with navigation, and has the added benefit of boosting search engine rank. Both navigation menus and sitemaps can be broken down into multiple, smaller units in order to keep things organized.
The look of the site matters, too. Attractive sites that look current hold the interest of visitors longer. A clean, crisp look with a simple color theme is the latest trend. Bold graphics and large fonts are popular, too. Most important is that the site has a cohesive look. That adds professionalism and supports branding.
Another consideration to site design is accessibility. It’s got to work smoothly on all the major browsers, including mobile. Mobile web is the fastest growing segment. It’s been projected that by 2014, more people will be accessing the internet through their phones, smartphones, and tablets than will be doing so using a home computer. To stay competitive, businesses must have a site that’s optimized for mobile.
A logically organized, visually appealing site is absolutely critical for keeping visitors once they’ve arrived. No matter how good the external elements of the marketing campaign are, poor site design won’t lead to conversion. A well-crafted and well-maintained site, with regular updates to drive return traffic, is the final and most important step to gain that customer.
