A person’s perception of your company is built on your customer service, reputation, advertising and logo. When all of these elements are positive, you have a healthy brand.

Here are a few reasons why a strong brand will have a positive impact on your business…

A professional logo improves recognition

You only need to see the ‘tick’ of Nike, the ‘three stripes’ of Adidas or the golden arch of McDonalds to instantly recognise the company. A logo can be the ‘face’ of a company; it will appear on every piece of correspondence and advertising. Logo design is a critical part of your business – large or small. A professional logo is simple enough to remember whilst strong enough to give the desired impression of your company.

Good branding creates trust

Your appearance is critical to building credibility and trust. If your logo looks amateurish and cheap, this is the view you are projecting of your company. People do judge a book by its cover, we are highly visual beings after all, and people are more likely to deal with a business whose appearance is professional, polished and legitimate.

Your branding generates new customers

Word of mouth referrals are the most profitable form of advertising; it’s free and they’re more likely to become a customer if someone they trust has recommended your business to them. However, if you can’t remember the name of a company, you can’t tell your friends about them.

Memorable experiences drive word of mouth referrals, and a strong brand leaves an indelible impression.

Inspire your employees with your branding

For many employees, a job isn’t simply just a job! People like to feel apart of something and have a vision of something to work towards. A strong brand can help your employees understand your vision and take pride in their work so that they too can share a common goal.

There’s one thing in common between all the most profitable companies, big and small. They have all built a strong brand that has established them as leaders in their industry. Your brand is intrinsic to the success of your company; at Defthaus we know how to build a strong brand for your company.

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The ability to concentrate on what you’re doing, a sense of control and an effortless involvement that dissipates worry are often all mentioned.

Bearing this in mind, presenting the user with a pop-up (or modals as they are also called) that disturbs their concentration and removes control, may suggest they can be quite harmful and have a negative influence on engagement.

Are you sure you want to leave?

Pop-ups are great when used in the right context; they focus the user’s attention and can make some processes simple and effortless. However, they can take control away from the user at a time when they want to be in control.

There’s a trend now where pop-ups appear when the user hovers over the browser toolbar, as if the user was going to click the home button or close the tab – a last ditch attempt is made to convert that user with a discount offer code or get them to sign up to a newsletter for example.

Is this good practice? Is making one last attempt to convert a visitor as it looks like they are leaving your website, actually going to work, or is it going to frustrate and alienate? If they have made a decision to leave your website, preventing them from doing so until they close a pop-up box, could potentially provide such a negative experience that they may decide never to return, even though their initial intention was to do so later.

People like autonomy and control

Taking control away from the user can provide negative emotions and this in turn, is reflective of you and your business. If you sign up to a company newsletter, you are naturally interested in hearing from that company, but if abused, and you are bombarded with email after email, that is likely to provoke a negative reaction – you have taken any sense of control away from the user and so they unsubscribe.

But everyone else is doing it so it must work, right?

Just because something is very popular doesn’t mean it works. Bosses throughout the land see things their competitors are doing and want the same – ‘if they have it I want it – if they’re using it, it must work!’ Certain practices are adopted without any data to prove they actually work. We’re not saying they don’t work, but as practitioners and preachers of good user experience design, we’re skeptical.

Pop-ups do work in the right situation

Pop-ups focus the user’s attention and can make processes appear quick and simple; that’s great for promoting a sense of positivity within the user. So when should you use them?

Well, an ideal time to use a pop-up is when it becomes part of the flow of a process – for instance, if you have a ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ button on your page and the user clicks on it, they have already bought into the process, they want to sign up! A pop-up is a great way of focusing the user on completing this process without taking them away from their original journey through your website. They complete the form, click ‘Subscribe’ and they are back where they were.

We believe there’s a time and place for pop-ups and we think we know when and where. Engaging your visitors and converting them into customers is all about providing them with a positive experience on your website. We don’t believe in following trends if they are potentially harmful to your success. We will always advise our customers, but ultimately it’s your decision.

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So we’re all agreed then, having a website that people can find and discover more about your services can be crucial to your success.

I’ve got a small budget, I can save money by building my own website!

It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? You’re comfortable with using a computer, you know what you want, so why not use one of the many free or cheap pay-monthly DIY website builders that are out there?

Well, there’s a whole host of reasons why this could be the worst mistake you could make, especially for a start-up business where first impressions and building a customer base are vital.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the reasons why these free or cheap DIY website builders aren’t a good idea.

A template isn’t unique

Your business is unique. It’s yours, and whilst there may be others like you, you are the better than the rest, right? Why then, would you want to use a template for your website that has been used thousands of times by other businesses – that’s not unique is it?

That template has not been designed specifically for you, it does not necessarily represent your business and your brand in the best light. Furthermore, that template has not been designed to engage and convert your customers.

What no mobile?

Many free and DIY website builders aren’t responsive so they don’t work on mobile or tablet devices. With the lion’s share of users going online with mobile devices it’s imperative that your site is mobile-friendly; if it isn’t, you are alienating a vast proportion of your visitors by providing them with an unsatisfactory experience.

You build it but they own it!

That’s right, you may have done all the hard work and built your own website, but you don’t actually own it. The data belongs to the company whose services you are utilising. If the company goes bust, you could lose everything overnight. If your website defies all the odds and becomes incredibly successful (this is highly unlikely to happen) and you want to move it to an independent host so you can develop it further, you can’t; they own it and their system is unlikely to be compatible with another. They can also sell your information; your email address is valuable and they will sell it – if you aren’t paying for a product or a service, then you are the product!

It’s free, but it’s slow!

We talked about the importance of page speed earlier. These free or DIY website builders are on shared hosting which means your website is fighting for limited bandwidth with every other site on that server. Furthermore, you don’t get access to the server so you can’t carry out speed improvements yourself. A slow site is bad for users, and Google doesn’t like it either.

Irrelevant advertisements

Some of these website builders place adverts on your website so they can make money out of you and your content. You are at the mercy of what these adverts look like and what they’re advertising. These can look ugly, be intrusive and do not encourage engagement.

Limited tools

A website template is limited not only in its appearance, but also in what you can do with it. Running a special offer? Trying to increase sign-up to your newsletter? Adding a feed from your social media accounts? All these are things you may want to do as your business develops but you can’t do them here! Building a website that already has a development ceiling is not good future thinking.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – what’s that?

Organic SEO is critically important in getting your website found by potential customers when they are searching for a business like yours. There is an art to SEO, both in how you construct a website and how you display your content. Even if you have the knowledge, you won’t have the tools at your disposal to optimise your website – and if it can’t be found, what purpose does it serve?

Content is King, DIY websites are Jokers

There’s no denying that the search engines love good content; not only relevant content, but fresh content too! Your website is visited on a regular basis by the search engines and they’re looking for fresh content – signs of life! If you have a limited number of pages, and no facility to publish news via a blog, you have no fresh content. Good content that engages with and converts your customers is key to success, who will write your content?

They’re not as cheap as you think!

Some DIY website builders charge a small monthly fee for their service. This sounds great when you’re trying to start or grow your business and you need to keep your outlay costs to a minimum. However, bear in mind that once you have built your website on one of these platforms, you are tied in. They own the website data so you can’t transfer it, and if you can’t transfer it, what are your options? You either start again from scratch (potentially losing your domain name in the process) or you stay put. What was a cheap monthly fee will soon add up. £25 a month becomes £300 in a year, £600 in 2 years, £900 in 3 years and so on…that cheap solution could eventually turn out to be a very expensive mistake.

Credibility?

If you use one of these free or DIY services, your visitors will be less inclined to trust you. One of the important roles of a website is the acquisition of information about your customers so that you can market to them. If your website visitors are less inclined to trust you, they are less likely to share their information with you. Ultimately, they’re also less likely to become a customer!

Security and Backups

Keeping your website secure from malicious attacks is an important factor. Waking up to find your website content has been overwritten with undesirable or spam content isn’t a good start to anyone’s day! If someone breaches your login and locks you out of your own website, you may not have the support to regain control of your website. Is your data backed up? If the site provider suffers a major malfunction and your website data is lost, you have to start again! We always use professional and reliable security software to constantly monitor our websites and we back them up regularly, providing peace of mind to our clients.

We add value

There are more reasons we could list here but if you’ve read this far and still think a free/DIY website is a good move for your business, then perhaps we wouldn’t be best suited to working together.

There’s a reason why we all hire the services of others, and that’s simply because we aren’t professionals at everything. Website design and development is no different; it’s a profession. It requires knowledge, skill and experience to get it right.

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How long can you keep a visitor waiting? Well, 57% of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load; 80% of these will never return to your website! That makes pretty daunting reading, doesn’t it? You have less than 3 seconds to load your website, grab that visitor’s attention and engage them. If that’s not scary enough, if your target market is aged 18-24, then you have 2 seconds or less before 65% will abandon your website!

We’ve all got fibre-optic or superfast broadband and 4G, so page weight isn’t really an issue anymore, is it?

Unfortunately, yes it is; certainly if you want to be found on Google. Sure, there are other search engines, but let’s be honest here: it’s how well you perform on Google which could make or break you.

Google has added page-speed to its ranking algorithm, and it is basing page-speed on real-world scores. What do we mean by that? Well, in reality, not everyone has fibre-optic broadband or 4G…some users still have dial-up and 3G, or less. That 500kb page on your website that was super-quick to load on your blisteringly fast connection, won’t be so nifty on dial-up!

Google takes an overall view of the world and determines, on average, how long your website will take to load across a variety of connection speeds. So, what appears fast to you, won’t necessarily be considered fast by Google.

Google feels the need for speed…mobile speed!

Today, with the rise in smartphone and tablet usage to access the internet, a responsive website is more important than ever. Your website should behave differently on mobile devices: the images will be re-sized depending on the device; some page elements that look good on desktop may be omitted for mobile devices. It stands to reason that the mobile website experience you deliver should be different to the desktop version.

Google used to base its speed rankings on your desktop website pages. However, this has now all changed. Google has both desktop rankings and mobile rankings, but it is moving towards solely mobile-dependent results when it comes to page speed. This is a logical step when you consider a higher percentage of people now access the internet on mobile devices than on desktop.

Page speed isn’t an afterthought

Page speed is now more important then ever if you want to rank well on Google. We keep this in mind when designing and building our websites from the very start. Mobile is no longer an afterthought!

We utilise a range of tools to measure speed: GTMetrix, Pingdom, YSlow, Google PageSpeed Insights and more. What may appear fast to the naked eye, isn’t necessarily fast in Google’s eyes. These tools allow us to see what’s happening in mili-seconds; which, in turn, means we can fix any problems that are slowing your website down.

There are multiple ways to improve page speed (but naturally we won’t give away all our secrets here!). We understand how important it is, so we create websites with high speed as a priority from the start. With experience comes knowledge, and because we know many of the common causes of slow page speeds, we can avoid them from the start.

It’s an oxymoron isn’t it – developments in technology have seen huge leaps in bandwidth, the devices can process data faster, and yet speed is now more critical than ever. We believe your website’s speed should be at the top of your priority list; ignore it at your peril!

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Improving the way your visitors interact with your website delivers a positive user experience and positive experiences are more likely to convert those visitors into customers. If people aren’t interacting with your website, this signifies that your site is not providing any perceived value. A website with positive user interaction not only converts, but will also allow you the opportunity to collect data about your customers; this data can help you make strategic business decisions, make improvements to your website and help to identify potential new customers.

Here are some tips on how we increase user experience on our clients websites.

Clear and simple user interface design

It stands to reason that if someone visits your website, they are looking for something. Making it easy to find what they’re looking for promotes a positive experience and will engage that customer. If your website is cluttered and has a complex navigation, a visitor may struggle to find the information they require – in this instance, the visitor may give up quickly and move on elsewhere.

Studies suggest you have only 3-5 seconds to engage a visitor to your website; it is suggested this is lower still, perhaps up to 2 seconds, for younger visitors (18-24).

Your website may be super swanky and look appealing, but if you can’t provide the user with what they’re looking for in a simple, straightforward manner, they will become frustrated and leave. A positive user experience is one where the user feels in control and the process of navigating is unconscious – if they have to think about it too much, the interface isn’t working.

A positive user experience is inextricably linked to good user interface design. It’s vitally important to get this right because no matter what else you do, however many bells and whistles you add to your site, if the fundamentals of an engaging website aren’t there, it won’t work.

Content (we can’t emphasise this enough) is King!

To paraphrase Jeffrey Zeldman, ‘Design without content is merely decoration.’ Whilst we are highly visual beings (we process images 60,000 times faster than text), it is the written content that truly engages with a visitor to your website.

If you understand who your visitors are, you will know how to talk to them. Well-written content engages with your visitors and speaks to them on a deeper, unconscious level, promoting positive thoughts about your business.

Well-written content is also extremely important for organic search engine optimisation (SEO). A visitor who has clicked through to your website from a search engine is hoping your website provides the answer to their search. Natural rankings based on organic SEO methods are more likely to provide a positive outcome because you have been ranked based on your page content.

Keeping your content updated and fresh is also important. The search engines like fresh content and if a visitor notices you have haven’t updated your website for several years, it won’t promote a positive view of your business.

Blogs – allowing comments?

Blogs are a great way of keeping your website updated with fresh content. They’re also a great method for encouraging engagement with your visitors. However, blogs can be targeted by spammers looking to build back links to their own website, so they can take time to manage, which is why we offer this service to all of our clients, ensuring their websites don’t become overrun by spam through moderation. Comments can also slow down your page loading time so we would advise limiting the number of comments displayed per page, ensuring your site remains fast.

Social sharing – word of mouth works!

Providing your users with the facility to share one of your products or a blog post is an invaluable way of increasing user interaction and increasing your website traffic. Allowing your visitors to promote your content to their social circles is not only free marketing, but helps re-enforce positive associations with your brand or product.

Strategically placed Call to Actions (CTAs)

Using strong, relevant and focused call to actions on your website will help grab the attention of your website visitors; when used correctly these will be located at the right stage of the buy-in cycle. Plastering your website with big, vibrant ‘buy now’ or ‘sign up’ buttons won’t work. A visitor to your website is on a journey of discovery, placing the call to action at the right stage of this journey is key to increasing engagement.

Providing a perceived value is also important to encouraging engagement though CTAs – what you offer in exchange for a visitors contact details is important.

Chat now – we’re online!

If you, or an employee, are available to answer any questions from visitors to your website during work hours, the provision of a live chat system can help improve interaction. They are cost effective, can help generate sales, whilst also providing you with data about your website; if you have numerous people asking you about a specific product for example, you know you need to improve your website interface to make that product easier to find.

Great customer service is an important factor in the success of any business; providing your visitors with the facility to speak with you whilst they are on your website can be a powerful tool.

Providing a subscription option

Your relationship with your customers shouldn’t just end when they leave your website or have purchased one of your products. Providing the facility for your customers to opt-in to a subscription or some sort (a newsletter for example) is an excellent method of strengthening and continuing a relationship with them.

At Defthaus, we can set-up, maintain and operate newsletter systems on your behalf, leaving you to get on with the tasks of running your business.

In conclusion

Your website is at the heart of your online business eco-system, but it’s your visitors that will dictate the needs for your website. A website is not simply part of your marketing arsenal; you don’t tick it off as job done when it’s finished. To get the most from your website you should continuously strive to improve user interaction. User data will provide you with new opportunities to improve your website and help it to achieve its objective as a vehicle for company growth.

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