When your company launches a website, it is your window on the world, the means by which you ultimately sell your goods or services to customers, but which must first offer them compelling reasons to do so.
Having a well-designed, user-friendly, navigable and optimised site is all part of that, of course, with a great user experience.
However, while there are many obvious basic things you need to do, like avoiding clutter, garish colours or poor quality images, there are also many specific steps you can take to make sure your website is geared up for your target audience.
Knowing what sort of people you are trying to sell to is, of course, a key feature of marketing. Your customer base may be older or younger, more male or female, have a certain income, share particular interests or suffer from particular problems. Your appeal will lie in your capacity to communicate how you can offer the best solution to solve their problems or fulfil their desires.
Your ideal customer is characterised by what is known as a buyer persona. This is a semi-fictional representation of your archetypal customer. For example, if you sell sportswear, this persona will be a young, athletic person who is a gym bunny or who loves to go running and play team sports. If you trade in luxury goods, the persona will be affluent and not afraid to show it.
All this should be reflected not just in your marketing messages, but the website design. For instance, a key element of any website should be to make it mobile friendly, as for several years now over half of searches have been conducted by phone, but this is even more important if your firm deals in high tech goods or services.
Another example is the importance of visual images when selling something on the basis of its appearance. This would apply in areas such as tourism - where stunning landscapes and cities with wonderful architecture should be highlighted - or products like clothing and jewellery.
It is also worth considering how the buyer persona relates to other aspects of web design. If your archetypal customer is someone who lives a busy life and is short on time, for example, you should offer short, snappy copy that gets to the point swiftly, instead of lengthy articles that go into great detail about a subject.
A key element of any website is to capture the attention of the visitor right away. Failure to do so will lose you your customer and may also impact on your SEO ranking, not least if the bounce rate is linked to a technical SEO problem like slow page load-up times.
To retain the attention of your potential customer, your site needs to stand out with content on your landing page or home page that immediately tells them through words, images, or both, that they have arrived at the right place to find the thing they need.
Finally, don’t forget that over time your customers will change, their tastes will shift and new fashions and trends will emerge, so be ready to consider a revamp of your website and its content in response to this in future.
If you’re looking for website design in Scotland, contact our team today