No matter what kind of niche your business is in, your website will play many important roles. It’s the hub of your online marketing strategy and a powerful branding opportunity. It’s also where many customers will look first when they need support.
A good website is often necessary for a business — but it can cause problems when it isn’t aligned with your business goals.
The right design decisions will have a major impact on whether or not your website helps to move your business forward towards its goals. These are key considerations to make when designing or redesigning a business website.
1. Does Your Site Encourage Repeat Visits?
A click-through isn’t a guarantee that a visitor will come back to your website. Slow loading times, difficult navigation and hard-to-read text can all discourage visitors from returning after their first visit.
Web design best practices — like high-contrast and readable text, design for mobile, and an effective navigation header — will help ensure that browsing your website is as frictionless as possible, potentially encouraging repeat visits.
2. Does Your Site Drive Sales?
Your website is one of the best places to build awareness about the products you offer. Customers may come to your site looking for a particular item you sell, but knowing when and where to highlight offers can help you design a site that drives sales.
For example, see this page from the website for Top Flight Automotive, a vendor of car parts and accessories. The central graphic, positioned above a list of product categories, makes a compelling case for one of the product types that Top Flight offers — high-quality indoor and outdoor car covers.
Customers on this page are already looking to buy or investigate the products that the company offers. The graphic helps to build awareness of a specific product type that customers may not have been aware of before.
3. Does Your Site Build Brand Awareness?
Most effective business sites are aligned closely with the business’s overall brand-building strategy. These sites help to really bring a brand to life — emphasizing the values and qualities that a business wants customers to associate with its products and services.
This site, from Confluera, a provider of cloud cybersecurity tech, shows off how the choice of color, font, and graphics can help lay the foundation for a brand.
Cool greens and blues are reassuring while suggesting the cutting-edge. A simple-but-powerful graphic shows how the product offers cybersecurity protection.
4. Does Your Site Provide Value?
Many good business websites help to educate and inform visitors.
These sites both provide real value to customers and those interested in a brand, while also helping to drive traffic to the site.
Often, business websites will use FAQs, blogs, articles, and help systems to provide this kind of value. For example, the homepage for Trader Joe’s, the American grocery store chain, features a lot of potentially valuable content.
Links to site articles and podcasts help highlight new products and their uses or provide interesting information on food science — like why cheese melts the way it does, or how the meatless meat industry has grown in the U.S. over the past few years.
5. Does Your Site Grow Leads?
A business website is also an excellent opportunity to grow new leads.
For this reason, it’s not uncommon for businesses to offer newsletters that allow visitors to receive the latest updates from a business. This field, from the website of eCommerce fulfillment services provider Deliverr, allows visitors to sign up for a newsletter on eCommerce insights.
Visitors will provide their email addresses — putting them in contact with the business, ensuring they see the latest articles from the company, and potentially generating a new lead.
Using a Website to Represent Your Business Goals
A website can play many important roles for a business. With the right design, sites can help to build your brand, provide value to customers and drive new sales.
Knowing how to design your site to align with business goals will be essential if you want to use your website to its full potential.
