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How to improve your website in 6 easy steps

Now more than ever, your brand and how you reflect that online through your website design matters. Across the world, businesses are investing in dynamic website design to find new ways to connect with their customers and adapt.

If you can’t be certain your website design is doing all that it can for your business and brand, then you need to keep reading.

What Makes an Effective Dynamic and Engaging Website Design.

An effective website design is one that best expresses your vision and communicates your key message. It’s a question that comes up so often for us. To start with, we believe a well-designed website is so much more than another static piece of business marketing collateral. Your website is your shop window – it’s how you uniquely present your brand’s purpose and values to the outside world, how you communicate with your tribe. It’s one of the most important resources for your business, so you need to ensure you’re making the most of it with an engaging website design.

Your presence offline only gets you so far, and in a digital world, you need to start thinking of your website as the face of your business. It’s the person on the front desk; it’s your warm welcome. It’s your silent salesperson. It is ultimately the authentic reflection of your values and your expertise, embodying brand-led website design that aligns with your vision for your website.

To delve deeper and share some key website design insights with you, Colin Byrne, founder of TOTEM explains our truly holistic, brand-led approach to UX website design. He believes that first understanding your ‘why’ and the uniqueness of your product or service is key. To do that means looking at your business and offering from the outside in – from your customers’ point of view. This customer-centric website design approach ensures you craft superior user experience designs that transform your customers’ journeys with your brand.

Some examples of client projects the team are particularly proud of include the Cliff Beach House, Eurofins, and Aton.

girl behind glass

1. Our Business Has Evolved in Recent Years, but Our Website Design Hasn’t Changed with It and It No Longer Reflects Our Vision. What Should We Do?

You’ve already started on the path to a better website. The first step is recognizing that your website design isn’t as good as it should be. Now is the time to step back and think about your vision. Think about the future. Where do you see the organization in five years? Where will your markets be? What sales strategies will you be using?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you’ll start to get a much better idea of the actions your business needs to take today. Over the years, your business is going to grow and evolve, and you need a site that will allow for this change and will grow with you – an evolving business website. What you want is a future-proof website design that five years from now will still be a true reflection of your brand values and brand purpose but one that can also react and adapt to the ever-changing business environment with adaptable website design.

2. What Are UX Design and the User Journey? And Do I Need to Worry About Them?

UX – or User Experience is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s what users experience when they visit your site, and it’s the new digital battlefield. From the moment a visitor clicks onto your site to the moment they click off it, it’s all part of a journey that your website design needs to consider. The User Journey is the process of mapping out the routes that visitors will take to important information, identifying the different steps involved in these routes. Without this, understanding how users experience your site is much more of a guessing game, so it’s an important factor in creating the best UX website design possible.

The key essentially is clarity. You want the user to feel confident and in control, and it’s about identifying the information you need to get across and making sure that your user-focused design is doing that for you. Meeting user needs through user journey mapping leads to a site that is easy to navigate, ultimately driving website growth strategy.

advert block

3. Our Website Design Is Cluttered and Confusing. How Can We Make Our Messaging Clearer?

It’s all in the approach you take from the outset. Proper planning upfront makes all the difference. You have to know what you’re aiming for. Who are your audiences, and what message will resonate with them the most? There will be a hierarchy of messages you’re trying to get across in your website design. Visitors to your site will come in all shapes and sizes, so you need to make sure the right information for each visitor is in the right place. Even within the same company, different customers will be looking for different information.

You could have the CEO looking at your site trying to get a holistic picture of what it is that you do. And you could also have the head of engineering looking for specifics on the nuts and bolts of your services. You need a clear navigational structure and intuitive website design that allows everyone to find exactly what they need in just a couple of quick clicks. Clear website navigation ensures that understanding customer needs becomes a priority, making for an easy-to-navigate website.

SEO optimisation

4. What Is SEO, and Why Is It So Important in Website Design?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is what helps sites like Google, Yahoo, and Ecosia show your site to the people looking for it. Websites with better SEO will appear higher up in people’s search results, so it’s a critical tool to help get your business noticed online. You’ll never actually notice good SEO, though, as a lot of it is done in the back end of website design. Good SEO works behind the scenes, quietly pushing you up through the rankings organically.

Using keyword research, you can identify the most relevant words and phrases to help build your business online. A lot of this comes down to understanding your customer needs and knowing the search terms most relevant to them. Without knowing the terms people use to search for your services, it’s impossible to make your site more visible, so it’s an important part of your process.

girl on bike

5. I don't have slick professional imagery to use. Is it okay to use stock imagery for my website design?

Your choice of imagery and photography is critical to communicating your business’s personality, to telling its story. The visuals you use are such an essential part of your brand identity and actually play a huge role within your tone of voice. Equally as critical as your content, the imagery you use instantly communicates your message to your customers. If a picture is worth a thousand words, think about how crucial imagery is to your tone of voice.

The choice between stock imagery and commissioned photography for your website design is an important one for your business. Both have their pros and their cons. Commissioned photography allows you to capture truly unique shots, but on the other hand, image banks give you instant access to high-quality images, perfect for when timelines are tight. When deciding on imagery, it’s important to ask yourself – what is your business’s unique selling point? There could well be situations where stock photos just won’t communicate this, and using anything other than unique and authentic shots could damage your brand.

We have written a blog on the key questions to think about when deciding between stock images and commissioned photography for your website design, along with an example of the importance of authentic imagery for our client, CLIFF.

laptop

6. What is the best Content Management System?

There are so many Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, and it’s hard to say which is best because each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Again, it all comes down to what you want from your site. There are a few things to factor in, like the feel and function of your website and how much you need it to do. Simpler sites can use more basic CMS platforms, but the more you want your site to do, the more you need from your CMS.

If you’re after something fairly simple, WordPress is the go-to CMS. It’s easy to use and is a great all-rounder. Shopify is great for online stores, as is WooCommerce, but if you want something with more flexible functionality, it’s worth looking into the heavy hitters like Joomla and Drupal. The key thing is to make sure you’re using the right Content Management System for you and your brand. CMS platforms aren’t ‘one size fits all,’ so the most important thing is to first make sure you know what you want out of your website and what kind of updates you might want to make to your website design yourself. From there, finding the right platform will be a breeze.

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