Your website provides the foundation for all your marketing efforts and as a result, it is one of the most important components to a successful marketing strategy. Investing the money in a well-designed custom website will pay huge dividends for your business, allowing you to grow and thrive in ways that simply aren’t possible when you’re constrained by the limitations associated with a template website.

If you’re still on the fence about which approach to take with your new website, consider the following ways in which custom web design can help you grow your business.

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More Effectively Conveys Your Brand Identity

Establishing a strong brand identity is crucial to the success of your business. It helps you stand out from your competitors, conveys your company’s core values, and establishes positive associations with your company among your audience.

According to data reported in Forbes, a strong brand identity will have a significant impact on the success of your business:

• Signature colors improve brand recognition by 80%
• Consistent brand presentation across all modes of communication increases revenue by up to 23%
• 64% of customers state that shared values allow them to form a trusted relationship with a brand

As the foundational component of your marketing strategy, it’s critical that your website convey your brand identity to your audience. When you use a website template, you’re severely limited in your ability to customize the elements of your website. This results in a more generic appearance that isn’t as effective at conveying the key elements of your brand identity.

Custom web design allows you to tailor your website to reflect these key elements of your brand identity. You’ll be able to use the exact brand colors, fonts, imagery and iconography you’ve established, ensuring a more consistent presentation of your brand identity that mirrors the presentation delivered on other platforms. This can help you build connections with your audience that will drive leads and improve conversion rates.

Improves Lead Generation

Simply having a website isn’t enough to engage your audience. You must also deliver an excellent user experience or people will leave your website to find what they’re looking for somewhere else.

The same Forbes study referenced above found that a poor user experience will result in the loss of a significant amount of web traffic:

• 38% of website visitors will leave if your layout is unattractive
• 39% of visitors will leave if images don’t load properly
• 39% of visitors will leave if the website takes too long to load

Custom web design helps you avoid these issues by allowing you to build your website with the needs of your audience in mind:

• You can craft the information architecture and navigation outline in a way that will be easy for your audience to navigate
• You can eliminate the bloated code that causes websites to load slowly
• You can ensure that a mobile-friendly responsive design is used so that your website functions properly on all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile)
• You can create the specific forms and Calls To Action that will most effectively resonate with your audience, increasing the likelihood that they will perform your desired action
• You can optimize your website for your specific customer journey to more effectively lead them through the marketing funnel

Ultimately, this enhanced user experience will drive more leads. The limitations associated with template websites make it much more challenging to create the user experience necessary to optimize lead generation.

Increases Website Traffic

You can have a beautiful website that effectively conveys your brand and delivers the information your audience is seeking, but it won’t help your business if no one can find your website. Google’s search algorithms become increasingly complex with each passing year, making it harder than ever to rank on the first page. Without a strong SEO strategy, your website will have a great deal of trouble ranking well.

Template websites often aren’t built with SEO best practices in mind:

• They often contain bloated, outdated code which can negatively impact your website’s functionality
• They often lack updated security measures which are important for ranking well on the search engines
• They often don’t allow you to implement a mobile-friendly responsive design, limiting your website’s ability to provide an optimal user experience on all devices

When you work with a custom web design agency, your website will be built with SEO best practices in mind:

• Your navigation outline will be constructed based on extensive keyword research, ensuring it includes all the specific pages necessary to rank for your target keywords
• On-page optimization will be performed on all pages prior to the launch of your website, ensuring they contain all the SEO elements necessary to rank well
• A plan for building a solid backlink profile will be put in place to help establish your website as an authoritative source, which is an essential component to improving SEO rankings
• Your website will be built using the most up-to-date and streamlined code, improving your site speed and load time, which are both critical ranking factors
• Your website will contain the proper security features necessary to improve rankings
• A comprehensive content strategy will be implemented to ensure your website continues to add the content necessary to support your target keywords over time
• Responsive design will be implemented to ensure your website provides the best user experience on all devices

Investing in a custom website built according to SEO best practices will help improve your search rankings, making your website more visible to your target audience. This will help you generate more traffic and improve leads.

Greater Scalability Over Time

Your business isn’t a static entity. It will grow and evolve over time. Therefore, you may find that the needs of your business – and your customers – change as this evolution occurs. It’s critical to have a website that is scalable and flexible in order to address these changing needs as they arise.

Template websites are extremely limited in their ability to provide this flexibility as you grow. You’re essentially constrained by the parameters of the template. Because custom web design gives you a blank slate, you’re able to build this scalability and flexibility into the design process. You’ll have a greater ability to alter the navigation structure to address the needs of a new target audience, incorporate an ecommerce platform if you decide you’d like to start selling your products directly on your website, or implement just about any change necessary to ensure your website continues to meet the needs of your business as it grows.

Improved Ability to Make Your Business Stand Out from Your Competitors

When you use a website template, you’re constrained by the themes available to you. These themes are also being used by thousands of other companies – both in your industry and in other industries – and as a result, your website is much more likely to look generic and have a similar feel as many of the other websites your audience comes across. This will make it challenging for your business to stand out from your competitors.

Custom web design allows you to create a totally unique website that accentuates the strengths of your business, reinforces your brand, and appeals to the unique preferences of your target audience. This allows you to more easily stand out from your competitors and convey your messaging in a way that differentiates your business as an industry leader.

Webolutions Can Help Your Business Grow

Most businesses lack the resources to employ a team of in-house web designers. Without a team of internal experts, you’ll need to work with an experienced web design and development agency in order to create the custom website necessary to help your business continue to grow and thrive over time. At Webolutions, we’re here to help.

As Denver’s leading web design company since 1994, Webolutions has the experience necessary to deliver the results you need. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been designed to grow your business faster, smarter and easier.

As part of this unique approach, we’ll engage your company on a collaborative journey that identifies what is special and unique about your business. We’ll also conduct extensive market research to clearly understand what your competitors are saying and doing. This discovery session, along with our market research, will help us establish your industry leading market positioning and differentiate you from your competitors. We’ll then work with your team to develop your key brand communications elements, which will be conveyed on your website and throughout your marketing strategy.

This process will drive the planning of your new custom website. You’ll benefit from our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™ which has been developed over the past 28 years, incorporating the knowledge and lessons learned from building thousands of custom websites for businesses in a wide range of industries. Our unique, fully integrated, strategic approach to website development creates a better client experience, delivers increased website marketing performance and achieves superior results for your business.

Contact us today to schedule a free custom website development consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 5 Ways Custom Web Design Can Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Your website is the lifeblood of your digital marketing strategy. All other efforts build off of it and without a strong website, it’s going to be extremely challenging for your digital marketing campaign to be successful. Therefore, it’s crucial that you put a considerable amount of thought and energy into designing your website.

While building a good website is essential to your business, it’s also not cheap when done right. So we understand if you’re still a little hesitant to move forward working with an experienced web design company that can deliver a finished product that will set you up for long term success. If you’re still trying to understand the benefits you’ll receive, the following discussion will explain 5 critical ways effective web design can help your business grow.

It Creates a Strong First Impression

For many individuals, your website will be their first interaction with your business. According to a Missouri University of Science and Technology study, it takes approximately 2.6 seconds for someone’s eyes to focus on the core elements of your web page after it loads. Therefore, you have an extremely short amount of time to make a first impression, and a strong, well planned design is crucial to your ability to make the most out of this first impression.

If you have a website with an outdated or unattractive appearance, it can cause individuals to form a negative impression of your business. Similarly, a cluttered page or a poorly organized navigation can make it hard for people to find the information they need. This will not provide the positive impression you’re looking to make, and it will likely drive visitors to a different website to find what they’re looking for.

Conversely, when you have an effective web design, it will catch your audience’s attention and draw them in. They will know where to focus their eyes, and they will clearly understand what you’re trying to convey with your branding. This will create a strong first impression that will help visitors remain on your page longer, encourage them to explore your website more deeply, and take your desired action. This will ultimately result in more leads.

It Builds Trust

It’s hard to trust information provided by a poorly designed website that looks cluttered, disorganized or outdated. If the design is this flawed, it is reasonable to assume the information reflects those same standards of quality.

For good or for bad, most individuals will judge the credibility of your business based on the appearance of your website and the quality of information it provides. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a modern, professional web design and quality, informative content which helps to build trust and establish your business as an authority. This will encourage your visitors to feel more confident exploring your website to find additional information that may help them, and it will make them want to learn more about your business.

The longer visitors remain on your website and the more they come to trust you as an industry authority, the more likely you are to capture these individuals as customers.

It Improves SEO Results

Your website won’t help grow your business if no one is able to find it. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a website that is properly optimized to rank highly on the search engines. While there are many factors that impact SEO results – comprehensive, informative content and back-end SEO best practices are essential – your website design will also have a significant impact on your search rankings.

A well designed website will improve your SEO results in a variety of ways, including:

• Using clean, modern code
• Adopting a mobile friendly, responsive design
• Providing a clear, well organized navigation architecture that makes it easy for users to find the information they need
• Engaging and interactive visual elements which keep visitors on the page longer

Most DIY website builder platforms are severely limited in their ability to address the items listed above. By working with an experienced web design company, you can be confident that these important web design best practices are being incorporated so that your website achieves the best possible SEO results.

It Creates a Consistent Brand Message

Your website is one of the most important opportunities you have to build your brand and convey your story to your target audience. It’s critical that that you leverage this opportunity to make your audience more familiar with your brand imagery and messaging.

To achieve this, your website will need to have consistent colors, styles, fonts and layouts across the entire site. In addition, these elements should match your brand standards. This not only reinforces your brand, but it also creates a more professional appearance throughout your website, which will help keep visitors on your website longer.

In addition to visually conveying your brand imagery, your website should help you tell your brand story. This is partly accomplished by the content on your website, but also by the home page elements and the navigation structure of your website. These items should highlight important aspects of your story and brand messaging, making it easy for visitors to start associating your company with your branding.

The more your target audience aligns with your brand, the more likely they are to start connecting with your messaging. This will help you convert more visitors into leads.

It Optimizes Conversions

One of the most important purposes of your website is to get visitors to complete certain desired actions. Common actions include:

• Filling out a contact form
• Downloading a piece of gated content (usually in exchange for an email address)
• Purchasing a product
• Filling out a survey
• Scheduling a consultation

A well designed website will generally help you entice more people to complete these desired actions – in other words, you’ll increase your conversion rate. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, including:

• Strategically placing contact forms in locations where they are more likely to be filled out
• Creating attractive CTA buttons which stand out and draw the reader’s attention to the desired action you’d like them to take when they click the button
• Implementing chatbots to provide a better experience and drive conversions
• Streamlining ecommerce solutions so that they provide an excellent user experience and make it easy for your website visitors to purchase your products

The better you’re able to optimize your website for these conversions, the more likely you are to turn these visitors into customers. While DIY website builders provide the ability to add some of these conversion elements to your website, you have limited control over how they are structured. In addition, certain complex website functionality, particularly if there is an ecommerce element to your website, is difficult to get right when you build a website on your own. Working with an experienced web design agency will ensure these complex functionality elements are designed properly and set you up to maximize conversions.

Webolutions Can Help

Due to the many ways your website can help grow your business, it’s crucial that you make sure it’s designed properly. Webolutions digital marketing agency can set you up for success with your upcoming web design project. As Denver’s premier web design agency, we have the experience you need to leverage your website as a tool for ongoing business success.

Our team has over 27 years of experience building websites. We’ve been doing this since the internet was in its infancy, and we’ve stayed on top of the myriad ways in which the digital marketing industry has evolved over the last few decades. Very few other agencies in Denver can match our level of expertise.

Our unique Websites Right Methodology™ has been developed based on our nearly three decades of experience designing websites. This methodology incorporates the knowledge and lessons we’ve learned from building thousands of websites, and it allows our sites to outperform others in the marketplace. You’ll benefit from a new website that creates a far better client experience, increased website marketing performance, and vastly superior business results that enable your company to grow and thrive over time.

In addition, we’re the only digital marketing agency with an exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach focused on growing your business faster, smarter and easier. We’ll lead you on a collaborative journey that helps you distill what is special about your company and the unique benefits you provide compared to your competitors. We’ll conduct thorough market research to understand what your competitors are doing and saying, and we’ll use this information to craft your brand story in a way that is unique, fresh and makes you stand out from others in your industry.

These brand elements will then be integrated into all aspects of your marketing to convey a consistent story that resonates with your audience. We’ll also implement the communications and tracking systems necessary to identify what efforts are working well and where there are areas we can improve over time. This unique approach will give you the edge you need when trying to grow your business in today’s competitive landscape.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

The post 5 Ways Effective Web Design Can Help Your Business Grow appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Client Website URL: https://www.SunValleyPotatoes.com/

Project Type:  Custom Designed Responsive eCommerce Website

Client Background:

Sun Valley Potatoes was established in 1978. For the past 30 years, the availability of year-round product has enabled Sun Valley Potatoes to deliver superior potatoes in the United States as well as neighboring countries. Their potatoes are handpicked and triple washed before being sent to your doorstep. Quality is extremely important to Sun Valley Potatoes when you order one of their famous gift boxes you will certainly be pleased. And you will understand why other potatoes just don’t compare.

Specific Project Goals & Challenges

• Create an updated look and feel that represents their unique brand identity
• Create the ability to order potatoes online
• Design and build a custom website that works well on mobile devices

Highlighted Solutions – Features and Functions:

• Design –The redesign of the website was inspired by the timeless, vintage look and feel of the Sun Valley logo. Since first being brought to public attention by Ernest Hemingway in the late 1930s, Sun Valley soon became a vacationer’s dream. Featuring bright colors, unique type, and classic hand-drawn illustrations, Sun Valley is perhaps best known for its vintage advertising. We sought to draw visual inspiration from that era and reshape it, giving Sun Valley Potatoes a unique look that would anchor the brand and distinguish it from other growers.
• eCommerce – The ability for customers to order potatoes online is now a reality for Sun Valley Potatoes. And the back-end management of the shopping cart is simple to use. In a signature mark of detail-oriented design, we also replaced the typical shopping cart icon with a classic wheelbarrow.
• Persistent Header – The persistent header allows site users to access the website navigation no matter how far they scroll down the page.
• Parallax Image – The parallax image on the homepage is easily controlled on the back end of the site and adds a bit of visual interest to the front end of the site.
• Reviews – Site admins have the ability to control which reviews display on the homepage.
• Custom Slider Graphics – To take advantage of the billboard space, we built several classic designs in vintage style.
• Featured Products – Site admins can easily control which products are featured on the homepage of the website.
• Simple Content Management – This content management system is simple to use and a breeze to edit.

Please let us know what you think about this fun website design.

A beautifully packaged box of potatoes makes a great gift for loved ones. Purchase a box of russets or fingerlings for your holiday cooking needs!

The post Sun Valley Potatoes New Website Redesigned & Launched with eCommerce Capability appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Let’s face it, most marketers are strapped for time, strapped for budget and barely keeping their heads above water. We know that we should be doing more testing but just have trouble finding the time.

What is CRO?

We do find time for all sorts of activities aimed at driving visitors to our websites, but, I would argue, don’t allocate nearly enough effort to figuring out how to get that traffic to convert at higher rates. Conversion rate optimization or CRO is often considered a part of search engine optimization and is the process of increasing website leads and sales pipeline by employing analytics and user feedback to achieve specific conversion goals on your website, landing pages or campaigns.

Conversion Rate Optimization Success Stories

Little changes can make a huge difference. The internet abounds with examples of how small changes to landing page design, button placement, calls to action, imagery, headlines and more can yield BIG results in terms of conversion. KISSmetrics, a leader in CRO testing, consolidated 100 great examples of conversion optimization. Many of the results are not intuitive which is what makes testing so critical. Some of my favorites include:

• Maker of underarm sweat shields boosted sales by 93% simply by switching to a more action- oriented headline, “Put an End to Sweat Marks!”
• Online watch vendor increased sales by 107% just by adding a “Seiko Authorized Dealer” seal
• SAP’s Business Objects increased report downloads by 32% by increasing the size of the button
• Software provider Veeam increased CTR by 161% by changing “Request a Quote” to “Request Pricing”
• eCommerce tool vendor saw 60% bump in landing page conversions by removing the sign-up form
• Increasing the product image size drove a 63% increase in conversion for Skinner Auctions

Create Your Conversion Rate Baseline

CRO does not cost a lot of money, but does require a disciplined approach. The first step, if you are not already doing it, is to create a baseline for website and/or landing page conversion performance. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can track site visits, bounce rates, exit rates, time on site and page views to get an idea of current website visitor behavior. You need to be clear on what conversions you are trying to achieve, e.g., free trial sign-ups, request a consultation form fills, resource downloads, video views or simply contact us requests. To track how successful you are at driving specific outcomes, you may want to include data from off-line conversions such as retail sales metrics, store visits or calls to get a full picture of the relationship between website activity and desired outcomes. If your conversions involve form fills, be sure to track the ratio of form page visits to form completions. This will help you understand if your form complexity or length is impacting conversion which is a very simple fix.

Form Some CRO Hypotheses

The primary drivers of conversion involve the clarity of your message, the ease of use/visual appeal of your site and the effectiveness of your calls to action. When formulating hypotheses on how to improve website conversion, start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Is your value proposition resonating with your target market? Is it clearly communicated on your website/landing page?
2. How relevant is your primary message? Does it quickly address the reason the visitor came to your site?
3. How easy is it for visitors to find the information they are looking for?
4. Are there distractions/obstacles that take the visitor’s attention off the desired conversion?
5. Are there red flags that cause the visitor to not want to complete the desired action?
6. Is there anything that creates a sense of urgency to drive faster conversion?
7. Do you have a compelling call to action? Is it prominently displayed to drive conversion?
8. Does your site inspire trust in terms of security, quality and customer satisfaction?

Create a Test Plan

Based on your baseline analysis of current activity, you should be able to prioritize the issues you want to address via testing. For instance, if you are getting plenty of form visits but few form fills, you may want to look for ways to simplify your forms. If you are experiencing high bounce rates on your home page, that page may not be effectively communicating your value proposition or addressing the primary driver of the visit. In this case, testing alternative messaging, imagery or layouts may be recommended.

The key is to let the data lead you to the most likely causes of conversion weakness, then brainstorm and prioritize the most likely fixes. Beginners will want to start with a series of A/B tests where learning from each subsequent test will help you drill down on the most important optimization factors.  Experienced optimizers may move on to multivariate testing to speed the learning curve. I recommend testing the easy fixes to start like size and placement of your calls to action, headlines and primary images just to get your feet wet before moving to full content re-writes and homepage redesign. When creating your test plan, make sure you take into account sample size.  To get a relevant test, you need to serve the control page and the challenger page to a sufficient number of visitors to drive statistical significance of the results. The pace of your learning will therefore be dependent on the number of visitors to your site.

Executing Your Test Plan

To execute and read A/B tests, you or your website partner will need to employ one of the many tools available to support website optimization testing. Google Analytics Content Experiments, Optimizely, and Unbounce are three of the most popular tools to support CRO. They all have free and paid versions depending on your needs and some offer support not just to set up the test, but also to design the challenger pages.

How to Use this Information

Are you spending most of your resources trying to drive more visits to your site and very little energy on optimizing conversion of your site visits? You are not alone. If your website messaging and design is up-to-date and your site is performing relatively well in terms of SEO and overall traffic, then your next point of focus should be conversion rate optimization. Webolutions can help you create your baseline analytics to help drive your test plan development. Call us today at 303-300-2640 to schedule time to discuss company’s CRO opportunities.

The post CRO: What is Conversion Rate Optimization? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

As such, it is extremely useful to have a web analytics platform that monitors the activity of your website, from visitors to bounce rate and time on site.  All of these metrics can give you an indication of how many people regularly see your products and how engaged they are with your website. This information translates (indirectly, of course) to your brand’s success. As I have discussed in previous posts, there is a lot of data to measure, and you want to be able to focus in on the most important information to your bottom line. This, I would argue, is data on website conversions.

Conversions exist in many forms – as actual transactions for an ecommerce site, or possibly as forms filled out by website visitors (see my last post on Micro and Macro Conversions).  All conversions should be indicators for the amount of revenue that your website generates for your business.  Obviously, with an ecommerce site processing the sale of particular goods or services, this value is fairly easy to derive; the price of the good/service would be the value of the conversion.

Even if your website does not have ecommerce functionality and is not directly selling anything online, there is still a strong case to be made for ascribing a dollar value to the conversions that do exist on your site. Let’s consider, for example, lead generation forms. Clearly, when a website visitor fills out and submits a form, they haven’t written you a check, but this does not mean that the lead has no value. Every business has some form of a sales funnel/cycle, and some percentage of the leads your business receives converts into real customers, who then actually give you money.

To calculate the value of your website conversion options, work backwards through your sales funnel.  You can make this process as specific or general as you like (a more specific approach will take more time, but can reveal insights for different customer segments). It takes X number of leads to generate one client, and you make Y amount of dollars per client. Use this process to derive the value of one website conversion.  Using web analytics, you should know how many conversions are completed, and therefore, you will also have a general idea of how much money your website has generated for your business.

How to use this Information
The examination of conversion data for your website can offer your business terrific insight as to the actual dollar value being generated by your web presence. Whether or not you actually set up a specific dollar value within your web analytics platform, it is good to understand the approximate value of each website conversion. As describe above, simply work backwards through the sales funnel to estimate these dollar values.  To make this process more accurate, consider including fields in your CRM that specify the channels that leads come through and how they convert on your site.

This is not a one-step process, and must be refined and recalculated on an ongoing basis to remain accurate. However, the resulting knowledge is well worth the effort. As a full-service marketing agency, Webolutions® can offer insight on how to get this process started within your business. If you would like to learn more about how Webolutions® can help you with this or any other digital marketing questions, contact us online or give us a call at 720-746-2732.

The post Web Analytics: The Monetary Value of Your Website Conversions appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.