Imagine a learning center without a signpost, a highway without traffic signs, or an airport without signage or directions, what would that mess be like? That mess you are imagining briefly explains why communication is an integral part of every aspect of life, business inclusive. Although people can still access information physically from a business location, online communication has proven beyond doubt that it is one of the most productive and safest ways to conduct business in a world that has turned into a global community. A website’s design determines how it looks, while its functionality determines how it works. For your business, whether big or small, to flourish, an effective website design is essential. This is because:
1. It sets a platform for wider/more detailed marketing.
I trust you have heard of something called an ‘elevator pitch’. This is a brief and succinct way of introducing yourself to a potential business partner and getting your idea sold in usually less than 30 seconds. Most salespeople start businesses using an elevator pitch. And, what guarantees that you will get the business deal is how detailed your website explains what your idea is. Most people you meet will revisit your website several times before striking a deal with you. Here, your website allows you to explain and market in detail what you do or sell.
2. A good website strengthens customers’ trust in you.
If your website design is attractive, well-designed, and responsive to all gadgets, chances are high that customers will be impressed and psychologically get interested in your goods or services. I onetime was looking for a communications firm to support the visibility of a project I was working on. On the recommendation of a friend, I checked a particular firm’s website and found a cluttered layout and hidden navigation menu. “If they can’t organize their website neatly, what will they do with my project?” I asked myself. I could not trust them anymore.
3. You need to compete favorably in business.
A business for profits is not a marital union that someone (customer) will be with you for the whole of their life. Businesses are inventive, flexible, and fiercely competitive, and for anyone to survive, they need to match or even outshine the standards of competitors. When you are competing, you most times have similar services or products with the same price range, and what allows you to set your business apart is the design of your website.
4. It gives you a competitive SEO.
Optimizing and improving your website (and its content) so it is visible in search results, where people are looking for information, answers, products, and services, is known as search engine optimization (SEO). When your SEO is done right, your business website should appear at the top of search results on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other search engines when people search for something related to your business. To achieve this, SEO drives targeted, relevant traffic from search engines.
5. Branding Uniqueness and Personality.
Developing your brand is one of the most important things you can do for your business. The creation of a strong, recognizable website will help you build customer loyalty and recognition, as well as help you sell to new customers. According to psychologist Seth Godin, ‘A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.’ And, in this, personality psychology on the memory of a given brand increases recognition, website visits, and response to several calls-to-action.
6. Supports in generating Leads and Convert Sales.
A website’s user experience (UX) plays an important role in determining whether or not consumers will return. A bad experience on your website will prevent someone from taking the action you want. Identifying customer preferences and purchasing patterns is possible by using analytics tools at your point of sale. This gives an opportunity to identify and categories customer preferences, as you work on their needs to fit with what your website offers.
7. Increase Social Media Reach.
Additionally, a website can help your business reach more customers on social media. Do you think your social media pages are enough to attract new customers? Do not take any chances! Only having social media pages is not enough; when a website links to social media platforms, it is more effective. Creating loyal customers is the key to building a successful business.
8. Supports Efforts to Communicate Constructively.
On your designed website, you want to be able to answer all questions potential customers might have about the business and the brand. By the time someone visits your website to ask basic questions like what you do, your products/solutions, location, contact details, etc., it means chances are high that they will turn into customers. This discussion platform drives business and explains why every business should have a well-designed website.
9. Allows improving Customer Service.
Established relations dictate the survival of businesses. It is common for clients who have sought your services or goods online to give their feedback online. A well-designed website allows you to hear from them, improve the quality of what you offer and push for more sales. For example, a section of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) enables customers to get real-time responses hence increasing long time relationships and survival of business.
10. Supports Extended Working Time.
Establishing businesses online means that your products and services are available to the general public even outside normal working hours. That way, you have the leverage to interact with customers 24 hours a. Being available constantly has proven to increase sales and trust. It even supports reach to clients in different geographical areas scattered across the globe. Websites with Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chat boards support customer conversations most and make this effort a success.
11. A Website as Business Data Hub.
As commonly said, a customer is a boss and determines the success of a business. One way of retaining customers is the use of data to arrive at business decisions. Well-designed websites have features to record and analyze insights on how your business is found, main customer interests, the geographical location of the majority of customers, and many more. This information guides you while optimizing your business website to maximize visits and purchases. Analytics can also aid you in identifying some of the opportunities you can change in the physical business/stores, hence guiding the business further.
12. Help You to Test Your New Ideas
One of the major ingredients in business competition is innovation. Innovation brings new and thoughtful ideas to life. However, the end-user or consumer of the innovation dictates its survival. If customers do not like innovation, you will know after it gets negative feedback or fewer sales. To avoid losses from heavily investing in innovations, businesses test, and pre-test them and seek their customers’ feedback on websites. This way, your website audience gives you direction on whether to continue and invest more in the innovation or halt and revise it before heavy investment. This is one of the best and cheap alternatives to test innovations.
13. Can Help Build the Credibility of a Business.
With this, imagine of a situation where you are getting air space information from local media in your country or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Who would you believe? Of course, NASA. Why? I would guess that NASA has more credible and skilled staff and equipment to discuss the airspace topic. Uploading relevant content on a business or a service creates reliability and dependability of customers in your information because you will have gained product or service integrity and a good reputation from them. This is one of the techniques for how the right use of websites ignites a spirit of stewardship in clients hence a personal attachment to your business.
14. A website is Cost-effective marketing.
Businesses usually set aside a huge budget for marketing. Imagine what an international business would go through to transverse different countries to market their products or services physically or through mainstream media. That would be so unfriendly in cost and budget management. How about you put whatever you wanted to market on your website? This is because websites are relatively cheap to establish and maintain.
15. Control the Public Portrayal of Your Business
You can influence the perception of your brand by writing your own story on your website, even though you cannot control what other people say about you. It is much easier to spread a brand’s message, vision, and mission with a website than with print ads or snail mail brochures. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date website is one of the best ways to control the narrative. On any given day, there are 63,000 searches on Google per second, according to SEO Tribunal. Imagine how much control you would have over the narrative of potential clients if you had full command of their narratives.
16. A Website Acts as A Referral
Do you ever think your website is not that important since most of your business is generated by referrals? Referrals are an important source of new clients for service-oriented businesses. As a web developer, my experience includes working with business owners who rely solely on referrals. In business, referrals are a source of assured customers due to the trust from previous customers.
17. Supports showcasing clients’ testimonials
Psychologically, people are attracted to experiences they can relate with. It is most likely that a client will choose you after reading a review about your product or service. To aid this initiative, you may want to include direct reviews on your website or third-party review platforms such as Yelp, FourSquare, and Google reviews. This way, the public can make decisions about your business hence its survival being hugely influenced by the website and online presence.
18. Websites allow for improving Knowledge Base for Your Staff.
A website can act as a space to improve knowledge management among staff in your business. Your business website admins can always set up a sub-domain only visible and accessible to staff. This can support internal communication, dissemination of new policies and instructions, and all new information meant to improve staff skills and competencies.
19. It Saves Operational Time
Many businesses get calls and location visits to attend to clients and sometimes sell goods. However, if these services are entirely offered online, there is a higher chance that a lot of time will be saved for other productive activities of the business. Websites with purchase features save market analysis time since the money and trends of purchases and other business dealings are automatically saved by the e-commerce systems of the website. This too saves the business from spending money on hiring a lot of staff since some results digitally arrive at.
20. Eases recruitment and onboarding of staff.
One of the most tedious processes in business management is recruiting the right candidate with the requisite skills to excellently perform the duty at hand. Previously, this involved long processes of application reviews, classifying candidates, and then interviews. With a well-built website, you can strictly do recruitment online by establishing a dedicated page for recruitment, modifying job opportunities according to filters in your requirements, and building an application portal that easily categorizes applications. This is a proven method of saving time and resources, and arguably arriving at a potentially good candidate.
To sum it up all, a well-researched and developed website is a powerhouse for business growth and survival. Over 59.9% of the global population (5.07 billion people) have internet access and that means all of this population falls into the category of possible clients. With the evolving and ever-growing e-business options, there is a big opportunity for business to multiply their operations. A website is vital because consumers’ behavior and market dynamics keep changing.