You Want a New Website – and You Want It to Look Good
If your company is investing in digital marketing, web design is the logical first step. After all, everybody is online, and a beautiful website is the most important component of reaching your customers digitally – right?
Well, the short answer is yes. Website design is the foundation of all digital marketing, which means that it’s incredibly important to get right if you want the rest of the building to stand up. That being said, a foundation isn’t necessarily judged based upon its appearance, but by its functionality. So while you may want a website that looks beautiful, what you need is a website that also generate leads for your business.
Beautiful web design and solid website functionality should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, they often don’t.
As an award-winning web design company in Frederick, Maryland, we’ve seen our fair share of web design projects. We’ve worked with companies in Frederick and businesses around the world to create websites that look great and serve real business needs. Through it all, we’ve learned that aesthetic web design is just the beginning.
Don’t accept a website that just “looks good”. When you’re looking for great web design, focus on these three things to make sure that your website is more than just another pretty face.
1. Search Engine Optimization
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website looks if nobody ever sees it. That’s why SEO is such an important part of any website design project. We’ve discussed SEO in more detail here, here, and here. For now, suffice to say that if your web designer isn’t paying attention to setting up proper title tags, meta descriptions, and schemas, your website is destined to languish in the depths of the internet, out of the reach of search engines and viewers.
At New North, we make sure to do web design with SEO in mind. During setup, we create a keyword sitemap, and we optimize each web page accordingly as we go. That way, when your site is finished, people can actually find it.
Tip: Make sure that you go with responsive web design, as well, so that your site will work on mobile. Not only does this benefit users who are on the go (which, increasingly, is almost everyone), but it also helps your site to rank better, especially when users search on their phones. Google greatly prefers to show mobile searchers sites that will actually work on their phones.
2. Design With Content in Mind
Your content is probably the most important component of your website. After all, people are interested in your site for what you do, for what you offer, and for who your company is – and your content is what communicates those things. Make sure that your website is designed with your content in mind. Image-heavy sites are beautiful (and images are a form of content, themselves), but make sure that you also have room for text content and messaging on your site.
Tip: A blog is a must-have. Not only does it give you the ability to create fresh content and generate more pages, but it also helps to establish you as an industry leader and an authority on your subject matter. This builds trust with visitors to your site. We’ve seen clients in Frederick become industry thought leaders on a national level, all through their blog. Make sure your blog has been designed in a way that organizes your posts and makes them easily accessible to your users.
3. Web Design for Conversion Optimization
Finally, make sure that your website is designed with the intent to convert visitors into leads or customers. After all, your main objective with web design should be to grow your business, and a website that’s designed for conversion optimization will go a long way towards creating leads, customers, and eventually sales for your company.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, though; When we say conversion, we mean it in the purest sense – from an unknown web visitor to a known entity. Conversion means that a user has submitted some form of information (name, email address, etc.) on your site. They’ve become a contact, which is the first step down the funnel towards completing a sale. And, of course, more conversions will ultimately mean more sales.
Good web design can help you create more conversions. A website designed for conversion optimization is clear and consistent in its messaging and includes easy-to-use navigation, clear next steps for users, and and prominent CTAs.
Tip: Keep track of what works. For starters, this will mean integrating Google Analytics into your site so that you can see how users travel through different pages. It may also mean investing in marketing automation software like Hubspot, so that you can begin to get data on conversion rates and individual users. Analyzing your user data is an essential part of designing for conversion optimization.
Get More Than Just Beautiful Web Design in Frederick. Get Frederick Web Design That Works.
At New North, we start each web design project with a dedication to your business goals, and do our best to create websites that have more than just good looks. Don’t get us wrong – we love designing beautiful websites (that’s a huge part of the fun of web design!), but we know that aesthetics and functionality need to go hand in hand.
Are you ready for web design that works? Get in touch with us for a free marketing review. We can take a look at your current site to see what’s going well and what can be improved. We offer Madison-Avenue-quality web design services in Frederick, without the high-end price tag! Jumpstart your digital marketing with a website that creates customers for your business.
