A great website design is an important part of a good marketing strategy. However, it’s also important to realize where the website fits within that strategy, and that it isn’t the whole strategy.
Even within the website itself, a great design is useless if nobody can find your website, or if there’s not any useful information on it.
Part of the strategy behind a website includes promoting the website itself. If you can put in the effort to make social media work for you, you have an advantage. SEO is also extremely important for getting your website noticed. Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy way to optimize your website. It takes planning, effort, analytics and trial-and-error. You have to know your keywords, understand what search engines look for, analyze what constitutes a practical goal, and take steps to achieve those goals.
The next important aspect of a successful website is getting leads. Even if your website is at the top of the search listings for all of your keywords, and you have a million hits a day, if everyone who comes to your site leaves after five seconds, it’s not doing you any good. Depending on the nature of your company, you need to get people to contact you or buy your products. When people interact with your site in a way that gets you business, or gets you the chance of getting business, that’s a lead. A good design can definitely help convert click-throughs to leads, but your site content has to do the heavy lifting.
People need to immediately see that you’re the best at what you do. In the course of a five-second attention span, the front page of your website needs to convince the user to keep looking. And the rest of your website needs to convince them to buy from you or use your services. Again, a good design is definitely better at this than a bad design, but useful information and samples of your work (whatever that may be) are vital to convince potential customers to become actual customers. The information that your customers will want most often should be visible to begin with, or only one click away.
