“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French author
THE 5 KEYS TO GREAT
WEBSITE DESIGN
Let’s take a look at what makes a great website and how you can apply it to your business…
1. A Clear Website Goal
A good website design should be engaging and satisfy a user’s goal. That goal is dependent on what your business offers.
Here are a few examples of some different website goals that might fit your business needs:
Lead Generation
Get a website visitor to contact you.
A contact form, request a quote form, or a phone number specific to your website can all help you generate and track leads.
Building Your Reputation
Answer a question.
When Google sees you’re an authority on a topic, you’ll be rewarded with a high search engine ranking. You know your business best. What are you an expert at, and what questions can you answer for your customers?
Selling a Product or Service
Sell your products or services online with an online store.
2. Simple & Consistent Design Elements
Look at the most popular website in the world – Google. They use simple website elements with plenty of white-space which is easy on the eyes and provides a consistent experience.
In our business, it’s common for clients to say “make my logo bigger”, or “can you just bold that?”. But when you start emphasizing everything, nothing stands out.
That’s where a style guide comes into play. We focus on using consistent colour schemes, typography, and expressive imagery where needed.
2. Simple & Consistent Design Elements
Look at the most popular website in the world – Google. They use simple website elements with plenty of white-space which is easy on the eyes and provides a consistent experience.
In our business, it’s common for clients to say “make my logo bigger”, or “can you just bold that?”. But when you start emphasizing everything, nothing stands out.
That’s where a style guide comes into play. We focus on using consistent colour schemes, typography, and expressive imagery where needed.
Organizing a website is kind of like organizing your pantry. If things are buried, it’s hard to get what you’re after, and you’re unsure whether items are expired, you’re not likely going to have a fun or productive experience in the kitchen.
The same goes for your website. Your content has to be easy to find, organized, and kept up to date. This is one of the first steps we’ll take when planning your website.
Once we learn about you and your business, we’ll figure out what content you need on your website for you to become an authority in your industry and stand out from your competitors. Having a good website structure also helps Google index your site higher in the search rankings, and help customers find what you’re looking for.
For example, if you’re a landscape company, you might offer several services:
- Landscape Design
- Landscape Maintenance
- Landscape Installation
Each one of those services deserves its own landing page, but they can all be categorized under “Services” and should be accessible from any page on the website from the main navigation menu. This allows the user to intuitively find those services from anywhere on your website.
4. Professional Writing
Your potential customers start their quest to find your website – or your competitors website, with a simple Google search.
If you have great content that matches a user’s search terms, you’re going to rank well organically in Google and there’s a strong chance that user will click on your website.
If you’re like most business owners, the thought of writing content might leave you feeling a little overwhelmed.
And that’s ok.
Writing content is one of the biggest roadblocks business owners face when designing or redesigning their content.
But we’re here to help!
Join us for a coffee at Starbucks. Great content begins with a casual brainstorming session.
There’s no format. We’ll simply ask you simple questions about your business (which you already know the answers to) like: what products or services you offer, what your goals are, and what solutions you provide your customers? Tell us your story.
From there we can begin creating a content strategy and do the writing for your website.
The key thing to remember is progress, not perfection. We can always edit and build on the content later. The key is getting it on your website so it can be indexed in Google.
Whether you need product descriptions, blog posts, FAQ’s, an About page, a description of your services, or a sales landing page, we’ve got this. Let’s grab a coffee, tell us about you and your business, and we’ll piece together a content strategy based on your goals.
4. Professional Writing
Your potential customers start their quest to find your website – or your competitors website, with a simple Google search.
If you have great content that matches a user’s search terms, you’re going to rank well organically in Google and there’s a strong chance that user will click on your website.
If you’re like most business owners, the thought of writing content might leave you feeling a little overwhelmed.
And that’s ok.
Writing content is one of the biggest roadblocks business owners face when designing or redesigning their content.
But we’re here to help!
Join us for a coffee at Starbucks. Great content begins with a casual brainstorming session.
There’s no format. We’ll simply ask you simple questions about your business (which you already know the answers to) like: what products or services you offer, what your goals are, and what solutions you provide your customers? Tell us your story.
From there we can begin creating a content strategy and do the writing for your website.
The key thing to remember is progress, not perfection. We can always edit and build on the content later. The key is getting it on your website so it can be indexed in Google.
Whether you need product descriptions, blog posts, FAQ’s, an About page, a description of your services, or a sales landing page, we’ve got this. Let’s grab a coffee, tell us about you and your business, and we’ll piece together a content strategy based on your goals.
5. Website Functionality
A good website should be functional for ages 0.9 to 99+. Along with looking great and having valuable content, it should scale well for all devices. That means resizing automatically to fit multiple screen sizes, and look good on desktops, smartphones and tablets.
Leave the boring technical stuff to us. We’ll work our behind the scenes magic to make sure your website is loading optimally.