Having Clear Brand Guidelines and User Personas

Your website is your digital fingerprint, an extension of you. A common mistake, and one I wish I had avoided, is that we often spend too much time comparing and looking for inspiration. The excitement sets in because you have all of these great ideas, and you rush to build a site that has all of the features that you liked from other sites. When you step back to look at your own site, you realize it’s not cohesive.

Having clear brand guidelines and user personas is key to building an effective and sticky website to properly showcase you and your business. Learning from this mistake I created a brand guideline for myself, set a clear set of values, and a mission statement for what I offer on my website. I also developed uniform assets that are used across all of my channels to create brand cohesion. Designing your website is fun. Yet, it can be overwhelming. So, I always recommend taking the time to build your brand guidelines before starting the design process.

The Importance of the Mobile Layout

I wished I’d known that the design for a laptop layout might not fit nicely for mobile and the importance of the mobile layout.

When I first designed my website, I designed it completely from a laptop layout. I did not bother checking the mobile layout. I thought that the website, or at least the theme I am using called Divi, would automatically shrink the page down to the size of a mobile phone nicely.

However, a few months later I realized that the spacing and design for the mobile layout was quite messy and ugly. Spaces were larger than usual, some pictures or widgets were overlapping with each other, and the website looked really untidy and unorganized.

A few weeks after I designed my website, I read multiple articles stressing the importance of the mobile experience and how many visitors access websites on their phones. The percentage could be up to as high as 70-80%. That was when I realized that not optimizing and organizing my website for mobile users was a huge loss in visitors and page views.

After tidying the mobile layout and improving the experience for mobile users, I saw an increase in mobile visitors and pageviews from around 50% to 70-80%. Additionally, the time spent shot up from around 10 seconds to 50 seconds. If only I had known the importance of [mobile layout], I could have gotten and retained more visitors and page views.

The Importance of SEO

I worked with a WordPress designer on my updated website five years ago. At the time, I had a separate business website, which I’d created myself, and a blog on Blogger. I wanted them combined on a WordPress website. I wish I’d known much more about SEO and best practices for naming conventions for all the images on my website.

I’m an interior designer and so my site is very image heavy. I wasn’t aware of how important naming with ALT tags, etc. was for all my portfolio images. Similarly, while I might not have gone back to older blog posts that got copied over, I would have done a better job with new posts including using Yoast, etc. I wasn’t aware of any of these issues and wish I had been.

Make Sure You Get All Your Logins

Make sure you get all your logins. Before you have a website designed, make sure that everything is in your name. Your designer should set up the host and register the domain in your name — not theirs. They should provide you with the login information for your host and domain registrar. If it is set up in WordPress, they should provide you with a login as an administrator. Their agreement should give you the rights to their design and the website content; otherwise, you could find that you cannot access and do not even own your website. This can make it hard if you want to change designers, move your web design work in-house, or have a technical issue you need to address fast.

The Importance of a Good Category and Corresponding URL Structure

One thing I really wish I knew from the beginning, when designing a website, is the importance of a good category and corresponding URL structure. Make sure to think really carefully about what categories you should have, especially what tough keywords (short ones, e.g., “best blenders”) for which you want to rank.

Then, you can create supporting content based on long-tail keywords (e.g., “best blenders under 100 dollars”) that fit your category so that eventually, your whole category will rank higher on Google. However, this is super hard to do as an afterthought. You risk losing spots on Google even if you properly redirect (301) pages to new URLs.

Website and Funnels Work Well Together

You need a website when you want to reach a wider audience and build credibility. With the right SEO strategy, prospects that are not aware of your brand or product can easily find your business on Google and land on your website.

If you have a project portfolio, awards, or customer reviews, a website allows you to showcase it. Another advantage of a website is the blog, where you can publish valuable information to engage with your target audience and share it on social media.

While a typical funnel focuses on a particular buyer persona and has a specific conversion goal, a website is geared toward different audience segments by offering various information.

From my experience, website and funnels work well together, and many successful websites contain funnels. For example, blog pages can serve as excellent funnels to target audiences based on specific interests.

Pros and cons of both?
One of the disadvantages of a website is cost. You need to invest in SEO, content creation, blog writing, and website design itself. Maintaining the website is also an expense. If you fail to update your website and it starts looking abandoned, it will damage your reputation.

A website’s pros are endless, such as brand visibility and credibility, global reach, tangible evidence of your portfolio, and past projects. A website allows you to create valuable content and engage with diverse customer segments in various locations.

On the other hand, funnels help you filter your prospects and ensure that only those that convert stay. They allow you to stay connected to your customers at every stage of the buyer journey. Funnels also work well with email marketing, so you can convince and convert leads using email’s efficiency.

Disadvantages of funnels include the inability to do blogging, very narrow targeting, and lack of access to extra information that customers might need to complete a purchase.

Biggest Difference Between a Funnel Website and a Full Website is SEO

The biggest difference between a funnel website and a full (10+ page) website is SEO. A funnel website is great for a single campaign and can be used as the landing page for different kinds of ads pointing to the page (Facebook Ads, Google Ads). The funnel website drops people right into the buying path with the goal the marketer is looking to accomplish without any sort of fluff. It’s direct, to the point, and great for lead generation. However, a funnel website is not going to be sufficient enough for SEO. Because Google likes to see a lot of content and a full picture of a company including an about page, services pages, contact us page, testimonials page, etc., a funnel website simply won’t rank well within Google.

Contrary to a funnel site, a full website will have plenty of content to rank in Google. A multi-page website gives Google plenty of information to crawl and then rank the site accordingly for its target keywords. The con with a full website, however, is the cost. Where a funnel site could be $500-$800 depending on the requirements, a full website typically starts around $3,000.

Long Term Brand and Trust, vs Just Making a Quick Sale

When you are looking to build a long term brand and trust, vs just making a quick sale or capturing data, is when you would use a website vs funnel.

Websites are more effective long term and easier to maintain. Plus, from an SEO standpoint, they hold more content and rank better.

Choosing between a website vs just a funnel also depends on the product and service, as well as the target audience. For example, for a higher-priced product or service that requires some trust, a website is the right way to go. For a lower-priced or impulse buy, a landing page would be best.

If you’re trying to grow an online presence for your business, you might have considered saving a buck by designing your own website. And why not? There are lots of solutions that make DIY affordable—and even free—and the results seem to look pretty darn good. So what can you lose? We asked a panel of professionals. Here’s what they had to say.

Quality and design are subjective to some extent

Oftentimes, when it comes to website design, the difference between a DIY/free website and a paid/premium design is its functionality. Or more specifically, how clean the code is.

This is very important to note because back in 2010, Google already told us that they use site speed in their algorithms. They also told us to aim for 2-3 seconds or less. But several studies have confirmed that most websites have terrible speed. On average, desktop versions fully load in ~10 seconds, while mobile versions take an average of ~27 seconds to fully load.

A quality website to me means it loads fast. No matter how “nice” looking your website is, if it doesn’t load fast, that’s a low-quality site.

In that sense, you should never sacrifice quality, or in this case, site speed because it affects your traffic and rankings on Google.

Quality is important

People have much more power and ability over making their own website, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that people have the funds or expertise to design an impactful website. In my experience, quality should matter more than a free/DIY website when your main goal is making a website that stands out from the rest. Free/DIY can leave someone to their own devices, and may not guide a user to the full potential of their website.

Quality is important, both in how a website looks, but ultimately its function and ability to achieve the goal of its existence. An e-commerce site that doesn’t get you any sales isn’t achieving its goal. You can achieve a quality website with free/DIY, but what you sacrifice is time to figure it out yourself, and lack of guidance on what makes a good website in the first place. Quality should be at the forefront of anything you do if you’re looking to showcase something you care about, and a website is no exception.

Quality should matter more

Quality should matter more than getting a free site when you already have a proven track record of offline sales and are looking to start selling something online. When you know something already sells and it works, then you should be willing to invest in a site that will do the best job of selling your product online. If it is good enough to sell, it will also sell online, but only if you invest a little to give it the best chance possible.

No target audience

Don’t associate yourself with the target audience of the site. It’s a common mistake for business owners to judge the site design by their taste, even though they might not be the potential users for their product. For example, if one likes sites in retro style and wants a design for the site selling toys for kids, it would be a big mistake to ask for a dusty, black-and-white design instead of the bright, colorful interface that toy-shop customers expect to see.

That’s why my tip is to conduct user research to find out who your target audience is in the first place. If you are not sure how to do that, order the research in a design studio.

Only about looks

Don’t think that web design is only about the looks. Of course, UI (user interface) is an important part of site design, but it’s not all of it. What really matters on every site is the UX (user experience). In short, it’s the feel of the product. Good UX makes it easy and pleasant for a customer to use the site, and, thus, do it longer and/or more often. Usually, when UX is good, clients don’t even notice it, but when it comes to a bad UX (i.e., when products in the cart disappear when you leave the page to keep shopping), it’s always very irritating and makes people leave your site. So, if you think that you can just build yourself a beautiful website in a site constructor, it’s not a good idea, as they rarely have an option to think the UX through or, what’s more important, you [may lack the skills] to do it properly.

Copying another successful site

Copying a successful site’s design is not a key to success. Yes, it’s important to know your competitors and the leading companies in your niche. However, there’s no point in doing exactly what they do. A qualified designer can help you create your unique style so that you can stand out, yet stay attractive for your target audience.

Past clients can’t vouch

When looking for a company to build your website, it’s easy to get caught up in fancy page designs and impressive functionality. But you need to stay focused on the key role your website plays – getting customers. So you need to confirm that the company you are talking to can design a website for you that not only looks great but is amazing at converting visitors into customers. Ask to speak to some of their past clients, and ask them about whether their new design helped increase conversion rates.

Remember that a new website alone won’t make conversion rates explode – work is required on the part of the client to help push conversions – but websites that are designed and built to convert will massively help the process. If the past clients you speak to run specific marketing campaigns with landing pages, ask them how well the landing pages performed.

Dark mode websites

1. No-code web design. Page builders have risen to prominence in the industry and will continue to dominate web design in 2020.

The complexity of page builders will mean that web design professionals will continue to create websites, rather than the owners trying themselves. Some will give it a go but ultimately fall back to a web designer for a professional finish.

2. Content is finally king. With so many page building tools on the market offering every design component known to mankind, web designers in 2020 will start to focus more on content-driven design, using visuals to “sell the story.”

We saw a similar trend with Microsoft’s PowerPoint in the 1990s with the ability to create animations and embed videos, and do you remember that awful creation WordArt?

It resulted in some eye-bleeding presentations that we were all forced to sit through at one point before somebody realized that the content in the presentations was the gold that people were mining for.

3. Dark Mode. 2020 will see more websites offering a “dark mode” option for their websites. I’ve already been asked about this from two clients in the past month.

Dark mode replaces the traditional white background of elements with a black or near-black color and displays the content copy as a lighter color for better contrast. Many believe this is easier on the eyes when spending hours staring at a screen.

A rise in Brutalism

Coming into a new decade, a lot of budding designers are looking back at one of the major styles of this time last century: Art Deco. In web design, Art Deco is pretty easy to reproduce with vector graphics while still providing a soft palate where UX-inspired, high-contrast buttons can still live and breathe.

More than ever, the continued rise of Minimalism is in order, but not quite where we’ve seen it in the last few years. Due to advances in web components now being safe for front-end developers to use on all major browsers, combined with a new fascination of headless commerce, it will be much easier for designers to play around with eCommerce designs and layouts. Since these are both pretty new, we should see this trend surface more near the end of the year.

With my last prediction, I wholly believe we’ll see a rise in Brutalism in web design. With next to no bitmap based images, clean of javascript clutter, this design style is most likely to be favored by SEOs and UX designers this year due to the massive improvements in speed and eye-catching design. While Minimalism may give many the Apple look their clients have been chasing for the last two decades, Brutalism catches that same UX magic while staying unique in this year’s growing sea of clean, minimalistic designs.

Data-driven websites

Most web design decisions in 2020 will be data-driven vs. “chasing trends.” Just because a design or UI works for one website doesn’t mean it will work for you. It might not even be working for them!

Actual user testing combined with some form of cohort/data analysis will result in a web site experience that is unique to each business, and more importantly, squeezes maximum value out of each visitor. The cost of customer acquisition online has increased 10-fold over the years. You can’t afford to squander one click/visitor – that’s why customer-tailored and tested designs are so important!

If you’re looking for web design for your business, you might be tempted to use an overseas company. After all, they can be cheaper and may even promise quicker return rates. But are the savings worth it? We asked a number of industry professionals to share their thoughts on the advantages of domestic web design companies.

Culture

If you are a company with US-based customers, you should consider using a US-based design company for your web design, UX research, strategy and amplification (advertising, SEO). It’s important that you understand the culture of the audience you’re trying to reach, and an agency that is immersed in the culture will be more effective at speaking authentically. The marketer’s chief commandment today is to “Be Relevant,” and cultural factors play heavily into the relevance of the images and messages you communicate.

Better talent

If your business is based in the US, US web designers are more likely to understand your target market and cultural differences when it comes to design. The US also has some of the best talent out there when it comes to web design and development. That’s not to say that you can’t find high quality design and development elsewhere, you’re just much more likely to find it in the US.

From what we’ve seen, local web design companies can vary wildly in price and offering, so it is always best to shop around. Since every company will attack a project slightly differently, you should at least try to find a company with a strong portfolio, with other work you like, as well as comparable pricing. If you’re looking on a national or global scale, it goes without saying that some of the best companies are either based in the US, or have offices in multiple locations.