Imagine walking along the high-street, glancing at the many different shops as you pass by. Some look modern and quirky, some look traditional and welcoming, but some look dull and dilapidated. The store-front is what business-owners use to attract new custom – it’s the first thing a passer-by sees of a business, and will often help them to form their first impressions.
Now imagine this online. Imagine flicking through several websites, each offering the same product, but each with a very different home screen. One is modern, one is traditional, and one is – well – dull and dilapidated. Just like with the store-front on the high-street, your first impression of that business may not be a good one, even if the product turns out to be first-class. First impressions count, and you can shape yours with the design of your website.
In a world where anyone, anywhere, could access your business’ home page at the click of a button, you want to have an immediate lasting impression. Your home page needs to pop out to them and scream, ‘our product is the highest quality and we take pride in our work’. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need fancy graphics flying around all over the screen, or flashing titles in your header – often the simplest of designs can be the most attractive. But it’s no good regularly updating the content of your website if it isn’t going to be read.
Your website needs to be easy to navigate too.
Customers need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and simply. Place all pages and products in relevant and obvious categories, and add a shopping cart to your page if you’re selling products directly online.
All of this may seem somewhat complicated – and that’s before we even move onto coding, colour schemes, themes, plug-ins and SEO testing. But it’s worth it. You don’t need to be an expert in web design to create an attractive online presence, you can outsource all of this time-consuming work to a digital agency like Universal Web Design.
We offer a quality website management package, which allows you to work with our team of designers, content writers and marketing managers, to create your perfect digital brand and that quality, aesthetically-pleasing website. For more information on these services, just click here.
You could get started instantly, for a fraction of the price it would cost to hire an in-house website manager, as well as taking much less time out of your day. When you’re a busy business-owner, we know sometimes it’s easiest to bring in some professional help to get the job done. And this is a job you want done properly – after all, the online appearance of your business is equally as important as it’s physical appearance.