Chances are your website provides customers a first impression of your business. Is the website clean and organized? Can products or services be found easily? Many of us are visual people and you form an opinion of a company from what you see first. For example, if an e-commerce website is unorganized and the website looks outdated, you will probably go elsewhere for the same product. The messy layout and outdated look is going to lead you to believe the company is old, the factory is disorganized and it may take you longer than you want to receive your item.

When your potential customers come to your site, they essentially want everything laid out for them above the fold. Much like when eating at a buffet, you’d like everything set out before you so you are able to pick and choose what you would like. Put simply, the easier you make navigating your website, the lower your bounce rate and higher your conversation rate.

Key Components To Keep in Mind

Some key components to keep in mind when it comes to the usability of your website:

• Are the services or products your website offers easily identified and accessible from your home page? Potential customers should be able to tell what services you offer and what your business is about by your menu, slider (or hero image), call to action buttons, etc. Various heat maps of websites show users tend to put all of their focus on the top of the page, as you go down the page users are clicking fewer links.
• Are your web pages loading at an appropriate speed? You don’t want users to feel like they’ve traveled back to the dial-up days. Choosing the right host, reducing ads, enabling cache and compressing images are just a few of the things that can help speed up your website. Slow page-loading times could increase your bounce-rate and result in the loss of a conversion.
• How are website errors handled? Instead of having a 404 Not Found page only stating, “404 Not Found,” you may want to offer them other options. Latest blog posts, service pages, about your company and most importantly the contact us page. Like we stated earlier, you potential customers want everything laid out in front of them, they could become increasingly frustrated with the usability of your website.

Is your website user friendly and attracting potential customers?

The Advanced Digital team is focused on providing the best customer service to all of our web design, search engine optimization and marketing clients. Our goal is to be accessible, approachable and responsive, while guaranteeing customers confidence in doing business with us. If you have any questions about our services, you can reach out to us via email, live chat, phone and even social media!

Welcome to part one of our three-part series here at Advanced Digital in which we will go over three key components to make sure you and your website are making not only a great first impression, but a lasting impression that will keep your customers coming back to your website.

By nature, many of us are very visual people. Much like when meeting someone in person face-to-face for the first time, your first impression will stem from things based on their appearance. Are their clothes wrinkled? Do they have a nice smile? What’s their body language like? These very same knee-jerk judgments are made when visiting a site for the first time. Is the font easy to read? Are the photos pixelated? Can people immediately tell what your brand is based on your homepage graphics alone?

It is with these things in mind, and knowing how human nature works, that it is of the utmost importance to invest in solid web design. If the overall aesthetic of your website looks dated, overwhelming, or of poor quality – the same impressions will be projected onto your business’ services or products. It is as they say in the foodie-world, “you eat with your eyes first.” If your web design is professional, clean, and essentially aesthetically pleasing a user is more likely to feel confident in your brand.

Key Components To Keep in Mind

Some key components to keep in mind when it comes to your visual presentation of your website:

• Is your website clean, easy to read and navigate? Potential customers should be able to find things easily. If your website is cluttered, hard to read and hard to navigate, they could leave your website and find a similar product with one of your competitors.
• Are the fonts you’re using compatible across platforms? It is important to consider the users on your website. You may have a font such as Wolf in the City installed and set for your page headers, but there are potential customers that will see a different font if it isn’t installed. If you’re looking for fonts that will stand out and grab the attention of your customers, we recommend using Google Fonts. The font library has over 700 fonts with multiple styles to choose from (handwritten, display, serif, etc.).
• Do you have images on your pages? Let’s face it, your customers are going to skim the content of your website. If you can communicate your services with images, you’ll be able to keep their attention and keep them on your website. We can’t forget about SEO, although images are important to keep your customers, you will need to support them with text and descriptions for the search engines.

So… what is your website’s visual presentation communicating to your potential clients?Subscribe to our blog so you can keep up to date with all of our future blog posts, including part two of this series where we go over: content and what role that plays in a user’s first impression.

First impressions are often lasting impressions.  If you’re meeting a potential client or customer for the first time in person, you are likely doing everything you can to present a good image. The same should hold true for your website.  According to research by Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes less than two-tenths of a second for a potential customer to form their first opinion of your brand once they’ve landed on your home page. That’s definitely not very much time. Knowing this, making not only a good first impression but a lasting one is likely at the top of your list for your business.

With June coming to an end, and us reaching the half way point of the year you are likely spending a lot of time evaluating how your company has done the first half of 2016, and what you can do for the second half. It’s with this in mind that Advanced Digital Inc. will be doing a three part series based on first impressions and how to make the best of them with your website. We will go over three key components, why they make such a difference, and overall how to best keep your potential customers on your site longer.

Subscribe to our posts by entering your email to your left and stay tuned starting July 1st, and every Monday/Wednesday/Friday next week for this series!

Web design is a hard road to navigate, especially when you don’t have a map to help you out. No doubt, all of us have heard at least one horror story of a self-proclaimed web designer skirting by with templates, failing to keep in touch with clients, and even taking the money and running. It’s hard to know whether the web designer being hired for the job will deliver the professionalism, quality, and promptness expected of them. Luckily, here at Advanced Digital, our job is helping you wade through all of the headache to bring you the crucial skills every respectable web designer should possess, and our team demonstrates daily.

When looking to hire a web designer, one of the first things to ask for is to see a couple sample websites that said designer has worked on previously. This provides the opportunity to see the kind of quality they are capable of while simultaneously testing their response time by observing how quickly―or slowly―they deliver the sample websites.

A web designer’s top priority should be how to optimize your website to appear in top results for search engines (SEO). After all, what good is a website if it doesn’t boost foot traffic to your business? Knowing buzzwords like “SEO,” what they mean, and why they are important will help to separate the genuinely good web designers from the ones who are trying to swindle you.

When it comes to web design―like most things―you get exactly what you pay for. This sentiment is important to recognize for all that its worth, because accepting this fact will save a lot of disappointment in the long run. If a client can only afford one hundred dollars of web design or SEO, great, any little bit counts and will only help bring in more business. But that work will only be worth one hundred dollars; don’t expect a drastic change. However, if a client is willing to funnel one thousand dollars of web design and SEO into their website, a drastic change should be expected―in one form or another. Maybe it’s a new logo design, or a new menu lay out, but something should be noticeably different.

Of course here at Advanced Digital, our team encompasses all of these qualities and more. Our goal is to never leave you in the dark about what’s happening to your website, we aim to be prompt and deliver the best quality possible to our clients.