While many people focus their energy on increasing their website traffic, this isn’t necessarily the most important success metric to drive new business. While you certainly need to attract visitors to your website, simply driving traffic won’t necessarily equate to new customers. It’s important to convert these visitors. For this reason, the more important metric to focus on is your conversion rate.

What Is Website Conversion Rate?

Website conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take your desired action. This can involve just about any action that you determine will help grow your business, including:

• Making a purchase
• Filling out a form
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Downloading your gated content
• Requesting a demo
• Scheduling a consultation

Your website conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. While the specific number varies by industry, the average website conversion rate is approximately 2%. This means that for every 100 visitors, you can expect to convert two customers. By improving your conversion rate, you can increase the number of customers you generate with the same traffic you already have. This allows you to get a better ROI on your digital marketing efforts.

Conversion rate is one of the most important success metrics to track since it helps you measure your website performance, identify areas for improvement, and potentially increase sales or leads without having to increase website traffic.

The following strategies will help you increase your conversion rate so that you can steadily grow your business.

Optimize Your Website’s User Experience and Design

A poor user experience or an unattractive website design can cause visitors to leave your website prematurely, reducing the likelihood that you’ll get them to take your desired action. Taking steps to optimize your website design and website usability will help you provide the best possible experience. This will keep visitors on your website longer and play a significant role in your ability to improve your conversion rate.

The following steps will help you improve your website design and user experience:

• Remove distractions and unnecessary elements
• Ensure clear and intuitive navigation
• Make the website mobile friendly
• Improve page load speed

Remove Distractions and Unnecessary Elements

A cluttered web page can make it hard for visitors to know where to focus their attention. In these situations, they may not be able to determine what you want them to do. Therefore, it’s important to remove any elements from your web pages that can potentially cause distractions and make it more challenging for visitors to take your desired action.

Keep the organization of your pages as simple as possible and create a visual hierarchy that helps guide the attention of your visitors. In addition, remove any unnecessary links, pop-ups or navigation options that can potentially divert people’s attention away from your intended goal for the page. Finally, make sure all your calls to action (CTAs) on the page are prominent, clear and a primary focus of the page.

A busy or cluttered page can negatively impact your conversion rate. Taking the steps to remove these distractions can significantly improve your ability to achieve your desired outcomes.

Ensure Clear and Intuitive Navigation

Another step you can take to improve website usability is to streamline your navigation. Visitors come to your website looking to access specific information, and it’s important to make it as easy as possible for them to find it. Having a clear and intuitive navigation will help users find the information they’re seeking or to purchase the products they came to your website to buy. When users are able to find what they need as easily as possible, it will increase your conversion rate.

You can also add a search feature to your website. This will allow people who know exactly what they are looking for to go directly to the page providing this information. When you reduce the challenges users experience finding what they need, they’re more likely to stay on your website until they convert.

Make the Website Mobile Friendly

More than 60% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices. If you aren’t providing a good experience for these mobile users, they’ll leave your website much faster, and this will significantly reduce your conversion rate. It’s critical to have a mobile friendly responsive website. When you build your website with responsive design, it ensures all the elements of the page will be correctly formatted for the specific device it’s being viewed on. This provides the best possible user experience on all devices and will help you improve conversions from mobile users.

Improve Page Load Speed

Your page load speed plays a critical role in the user experience your website provides. More than 40% of people will leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. This will drive close to half of your traffic away before they even engage with your website. By improving your page load speed, you’ll be able to prevent this issue, and you’ll also keep people on your website much longer. This will help significantly improve your conversion rate.

Write Compelling and Persuasive Content

Your website content plays an important role in your ability to improve conversions. When your content provides value to your visitors, it will help you increase conversions by:

• Building trust with your audience
• Establishing yourself as an industry thought leader
• Providing a better experience for users
• Allowing you to educate your audience on the value your products and services will provide to them

You can further optimize your high-quality content by writing it in a compelling and persuasive manner:

• Create strong headlines
• Highlight key benefits and unique value propositions
• Use action-oriented language that creates compelling CTAs

Add Social Proof

The Internet has revolutionized the way people evaluate the products and services they purchase. More than ever, people rely on the insights of others to evaluate a company’s offerings. Your online reputation plays a critical role in your ability to improve your conversion rate, as 89% of consumers look at online reviews before making a purchase.

For this reason, it’s important to include social proof on your website:

• Include links to Yelp, Google, Trustpilot, or any other sites where customers have left reviews
• Add testimonials and reviews to every critical page on your website so that visitors can see this social proof while they’re evaluating your offering
• Display trust badges and security seals on your website
• Showcase the logos of well-known clients and partners on your website

Without this social proof on your website, your conversion rate will most likely suffer.

Simplify Forms and Checkout Processes

Forms are an important conversion element to add to your website. However, the way you structure your forms will play a critical role in how often users fill them out. No one likes to fill out long, complicated forms that have a lot of required fields. Often, asking for more information than is necessary for your sales team to close the lead will make people hesitant to fill out your forms, decreasing their effectiveness.

You can improve the conversion rate on your forms by simplifying them. Make sure you only ask for the essential information needed to accomplish your goal. Shortening your forms will reduce hesitation among your website visitors. In addition, the less time it takes people to fill out your form, the more likely they are to complete the process.

The same logic applies to the online checkout process with eCommerce websites. You should always keep your checkout form as short and simple as possible to encourage people to complete the purchase. Limiting your form to the customer’s name, address and payment information will provide the best user experience. In addition, you can implement the following best practices to increase the likelihood that people will complete the purchase process:

• Add a progress bar to the checkout so users know where they are in the process
• Enable autocomplete for any fields where it’s applicable
• Offer a guest checkout option

Offer Live Chat Support

Often, a website visitor may not convert because they had a question or concern that they couldn’t have answered while they were on your website. You can often nudge these individuals off the fence by adding live chat support to your website.

If you have the resources, you can have live chat support manned by your team, providing website visitors direct access to live customer service agents. However, this often isn’t realistic. You can also use automated chatbots to address many of the questions and concerns of your website visitors, providing a much more cost-effective solution. This live chat support can alleviate many of the concerns of your visitors, helping you push them over the finish line and get them to convert.

Webolutions Can Help Improve Your Conversion Rate

As Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, Webolutions has the experience and expertise necessary to help you improve your conversion rate. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been constructed to help you grow your business smarter, faster and easier. As part of this approach, we’ll work closely with your team to learn about your target audience and the unique benefits your customers/clients experience. This information will be used to help improve your conversion rates.

At Webolutions, we take a data-driven approach to conversion rate optimization. Our team will gather comprehensive performance intelligence data that will help us understand which aspects of your website marketing are generating the most conversions and which are struggling to achieve your goals. Based on this data, we’ll make customized recommendations that will help fine-tune your website’s performance and increase conversion rates.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions provides comprehensive digital marketing services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post How to Improve Website Conversion Rates appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

New website design and development techniques are emerging all the time, allowing you to more effectively build a website that crafts experiences that will engage your audience, resonate with them on an emotional level, and inspire them to take action. Understanding how to leverage these best practices with your upcoming website redesign project will ensure you end up with a finished product that sets your business up for long-term success.

Before you begin working on your new website, make sure you understand the following web design and development best practices to ensure they get incorporated into your project.

Emphasize User-Centric Design

The most effective websites are designed with the needs of your audience in mind. The more you’re able to deliver a great experience, the more likely you are to increase website traffic, generate high-quality leads, and convert these leads into paying customers. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a focus on user experience is one of the top website design and development best practices today.

Every aspect of your website should be designed with the user’s experience in mind:

• The banner image and headline, videos, text and images on each page should be structured to engage your users the moment they click on your website.
• The navigation menu should be clear and make it easy for readers to find what they need on your website.
• Every piece of information on the home page should help direct users to the key pages on your website, and each section of this page should clearly convey what your business has to offer and how it can address the pain points of your users.
• Your website developers should use clean code that ensures your website loads extremely fast and prevents impatient users from seeking information elsewhere.

To ensure your website is designed with a good user experience in mind, make sure you clearly define the needs of your website users at the start of the project. Who is your target audience, and what are they trying to accomplish when they visit your website? Are they looking to find a product, conduct research about a subject related to your product/service offering, make a purchase, or achieve some other goal? How familiar are they with your brand and your products/services?

When you understand these user needs in advance, you’ll be able to design a website that provides the exceptional experience your audience desires. Creating detailed buyer personas will help you to more clearly understand the needs, pain points and motivations of each different audience segment you serve.

More Helpful Information for Your: 9 Things to Consider When Redesigning Your Website

Use Design Conventions That Create a Familiar and Predictable Experience

While creativity is a virtue in web design and can help your new website stand out, you may run the risk of confusing users if this creativity breaks from established web design conventions. When this occurs, it can potentially cause people to seek their desired information from a website that provides them with a more familiar and predictable experience.

The following design convention best practices will help make users feel more comfortable navigating your website:

• Place the main navigation menus either across the top of the page or in the upper left corner. This is where users expect to find them.
• Have a clear banner area with a headline that effectively conveys the transformation your business creates for your customers/clients. Most website users will form an impression of your website within 50 milliseconds, so you have very little time to get your message across. Effective banner messaging is critical to ensuring users stay on your website.
• Place your company logo in the upper left corner of the website on all pages. This logo should always link back to the home page so that users can easily return there if they need to.
• Use recognizable icons such as a shopping cart for ecommerce purchases or a magnifying glass for a search bar.
• Use CTA buttons with colors that stand out from the rest of your web design so that users can easily identify them. Have these buttons change colors when users hover over them so they receive feedback that clicking on the button will result in their desired action.
• Place your phone number at the top and bottom of every page on the website. Use a large font that is extremely visible, and make the phone number clickable so that mobile users can call you easily.

Implement an Intuitive Navigation Structure

Users won’t spend much time on your website if they can’t quickly and easily find the information they’re seeking. Therefore, make sure your website has clear, logical navigation that allows users to quickly locate the information they’re looking for.

Your website design and development team should use these best practices when developing your navigation:

• Make sure your navigation menu is easy to find on both desktop and mobile so that all users can access the information they need without difficulty.
• Use common labeling conventions with your top navigation menu such as About, Services, Contact, etc. so that your users know what to expect when they hover over these items.
• Keep your menu names simple, descriptive and relevant to the sections of your website they’re highlighting.
• Use breadcrumbs to track user journeys. This will make it easy for them to retrace their steps if they want to revisit a previous page they viewed.
• Add links to the main content on each page so that users can navigate to relevant pages as they’re reading. Make sure these links have descriptive anchor text so that it’s clear where the links will take the reader.
• Include a search bar at the top right of each page so that users can more easily find the items they’re looking for without perusing each dropdown in your navigation menu. This is especially important if you have pages that aren’t listed in your main navigation dropdown menus.
• Add a navigation footer so users don’t need to scroll up to the top of the page to find the next page they want to read.

Create an Information Hierarchy

Organize the content and other on-page elements in a way that guides users’ attention and highlights the most important information. This will help guide your users to the actions you want them to take in a natural way.

There are two different aspects of an information hierarchy:

• Content hierarchy
• Visual hierarchy

Content hierarchy is directly focused on the written content on the page. An effective content hierarchy will place the most important information at the top of the page and less important information near the bottom.

Visual hierarchy uses the different visual elements on the page to highlight the most important information and guide your users to the places you want them to focus their attention. This is accomplished by using graphical elements such as font size, bold/italic text, spacing and color to emphasize important information on the page.

An effective information hierarchy will use the content hierarchy and visual hierarchy in a complementary manner to create even greater emphasis, making it very obvious to the reader where they should focus their attention.

Make Your Content Easy to Read

We’ve all encountered websites that have hard-to-read content. Whether it’s due to poor contrast between text and background colors, text that is too small to read, large blocks of text, cluttered page layouts, or some other reason, the outcome is generally the same – we spend very little time on those websites and instead seek out the information we need elsewhere.

Having an easy-to-read website is a critical component to creating a good user experience, and it is essential for achieving your desired marketing results. The following best practices will ensure your content is easy to read:

• Use a clear font (not a cursive font) and make sure it is at least 12-point
• Use consistent fonts across the website to create a cohesive feel
• Use different font styles for your content compared to menu items and navigation buttons so that your content will stand out and be easier to read
• Use no more than two or three font sizes throughout the website
• Structure content into shorter paragraphs that are more easily read and scanned than big paragraphs containing large blocks of text
• Use bullet lists whenever possible to make your pages more scannable
• Use contrasting colors for your text and your background to make the text stand out more clearly
• Include strong visual elements on each page to break up the text and improve readability

Design Clear, Compelling Calls to Action (CTAs)

In order for your website to successfully achieve your marketing goals, it needs to be able to persuade your audience to take your desired action. The actions you ask them to take will depend on your specific goals. Some potential goals of your CTAs may be to ask your users to purchase a product, download a lead magnet piece, request a free demo, or sign up for your newsletter.

In order to ensure your CTAs do an effective job compelling your audience to act, make sure to adhere to the following best practices:

• Make your CTA buttons clearly visible by including plenty of white space around them (never bury them within large blocks of text)
• Include relevant CTAs on all pages
• Use consistent CTAs for the same actions to reduce confusion and ensure your audience understands what you’re asking them to do

Implement Responsive Design

Our increasing reliance on smart phones has changed the way people interact with websites. Today, more than 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, and this figure will most likely continue rising in the future. Therefore, it’s critical that your website provides a good user experience on all devices (desktop, tablet and mobile). If mobile users find your website hard to navigate or if elements don’t display correctly, they will leave and seek their desired information from a website that provides a better mobile experience.

In order to ensure your website delivers a great mobile experience, you should always use responsive design. Responsive design is an approach to web design and development in which the interface adapts to the device’s layout to ensure usability, navigation and appearance is consistent on all devices. It has been an established web design and development best practice for many years, but it remains one of the most important steps you can take to have a mobile-friendly website that delivers a great experience across all devices.

Implement SEO Best Practices

In order for your website to achieve your marketing goals, your audience must be able to find it. Therefore, implementing SEO best practices as part of your initial web design and development is critical.

The following SEO best practices will help you rank as highly as possible on search engines:

• Conduct keyword research during the initial stages of the web design and development process to identify the right terms to target and create content around.
• Create keyword-optimized content that provides value to your audience.
• Use keyword rich headings and subheadings on all pages to help users and search engines understand the content of each page.
• Include a site map to make it easy for web crawlers to understand your website architecture.
• Use descriptive file names and alt text for images and videos to make it easier for search engines to understand the content of your multimedia.
• Build high-quality backlinks from reputable, relevant websites.
• Optimize your website’s technical elements such as speed, URL structure and internal linking to improve user experience and help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively.

Implement Robust Security Measures

Regardless of whether you accept payments through your website, having good website security is critical. It will protect user data and build trust for your brand. The following best practices will help ensure you maintain good website security:

• Use a secure web host with antivirus and anti-malware software, encryption, server-side firewalls, SSL certificate, CDN availability and on-site security systems
• Use two-factor authentication and require secure passwords that must contain letters, numbers and special symbols
• Prevent unauthorized access by using plugins that limit unsuccessful login attempts

Webolutions Can Build a High Performing Website That Helps Your Business Thrive

Due to the many technical elements associated with building a successful website, it’s important to work with an experienced web design and development company that can ensure every step of the process is handled correctly. Webolutions has been Denver’s leading web design company since 1994, and we can build the high performing website your business needs to grow and thrive.

At Webolutions, we have a team of seasoned web design and development specialists who know how to build your new website according to the latest industry best practices. This ensures your new website will perform well, engage your audience, generate leads and grow your business.

You’ll benefit from our unique Websites Right Methodology™ which provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to website development. This exclusive approach has been refined over nearly 30 years and incorporates the knowledge and lessons learned from designing thousands of websites. Our Websites Right Methodology™ utilizes a meticulous process that creates a far better client experience and results in superior website marketing performance that elevates your business results.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 9 Website Design and Development Best Practices for 2024 appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

However, the needs and goals of business websites are completely different than those required of government organizations. When Douglas County, Colorado tasked us with building their new website, it provided us with an entirely new set of challenges to address. Our web design and development team embraced these challenges head on and came up with a variety of innovative solutions to deliver the robust website solutions they needed.

The Douglas County website was a unique project. It is a government website for a massive county with dozens of different departments, offices and divisions that all have different roles in the government and different needs from the website to fulfill their obligation to citizens. In addition, Douglas County has a very diverse end user group comprised of both residents and businesses. The leaders of Douglas County wanted to work with a local Denver web design company that understood the dynamics of their county. They turned to us to create an effective solution for the complex challenges associated with building an overarching website that can address the disparate needs of all these different groups.

Douglas County Web Design Project Goals

The goals of a business website typically revolve around achieving results that can help grow the company. But a government website seeks to achieve very different goals. They’re not concerned with improving SEO results, generating and converting more leads, conveying a compelling brand story, or selling products. Instead, these websites need to be focused on providing an exceptional user experience:

• For government staff, this involves making it easy for them to make updates to the website as needed
• For end users (residents and businesses), this involves making it easy for them to find the information they need when they visit the website
• In addition, there is also a need to be sensitive to the county’s fiduciary responsibility of taxpayer dollars, and ensure these funds are being used in the most efficient and economical way possible

Goals to Address the Needs of Government Staff

We were tasked with addressing a wide range of goals and challenges associated with the needs of government staff. The most important included:

• Creating a website that reflects everything they are as a county, as related to the diverse services they provide
• Developing imagery and messaging updates to convey a clearly defined and cohesive experience
• Creating workflows that support their new governance model
• Developing website content management capabilities that are easy for the Douglas County staff to navigate
• Creating customized solutions for dozens of different departments with varying needs

Goals to Address the Needs of End Users

The challenges and goals associated with the needs of end users (county residents and businesses) were quite different. These involved:

• Creating an exceptional website usability experience for citizens
• Build a system that makes doing business on the website easy and convenient
• Develop a solution that makes it easy for individuals to find what they need for citizens who don’t know which department manages the tasks they need to complete
• Create a navigation structure that organizes the website by department for individuals who work with the government all the time and want to find what they need within a specific department’s section of the website
• Addressing all legally mandated ADA accessibility requirements

Fiduciary Goals

It was important to provide a solution that made efficient use of taxpayer money. This required us to develop a plan that was as streamlined and efficient as possible. In addition, we needed to make sure that future website enhancements could easily be implemented in a cost-effective manner.

Solutions to Meet the Website Needs of Douglas County

Douglas County Website addresses the needs of over 30 offices, departments and divisions

Many government websites are built off a template that creates rigidity. This isn’t ideal for a large government agency that requires unique solutions to address the varied needs of different departments and entities. We recognized right away that a customized approach was necessary to provide them with the solution they needed.

Meticulous planning was critical to the success of this web design project. One of the main challenges we worked through was getting all the different Douglas County agencies aligned during the planning process. To achieve this, we met with every department to better understand their specific goals and needs for the website. Then, we spent additional planning time creating a solution that was able to factor in the needs of each agency.

This process was critical to ensure we addressed all the diverse goals required of their new website. Without our team’s extensive experience with detailed website planning and the ability to navigate very large website projects, these disparate goals would be much harder to achieve. Our team was able to bring all these separate goals together to create a customized solution that met these varied needs more effectively and seamlessly.

Solutions to Address the Needs of Douglas County Staff

We developed a variety of solutions to achieve the diverse goals and needs of the Douglas County staff. We were able to create a global website that serves over 30 offices, departments and divisions within the county. This provides a streamlined experience for both government employees and website end users. In addition, it ensured that all these offices, divisions and departments were represented on the website and had the ability to deliver the services and information they’re tasked with providing to residents and businesses.

In addition, we took several steps to provide their staff with the website management capabilities they required:

• 

  Each department has its own navigation architecture on their main department page

  We created a separate navigation architecture for most departments that can be accessed off their main department page. This gives Douglas County staff members greater control over how they organize information on the website.

• We created dashboards using Analytics data to help departments determine the information that residents and businesses access most often. This data allows them to make more informed decisions on the menus and content needed on the website.
• We designed a variety of content blocks that are simple and easy to use. This provided the Douglas County staff members who are acting as website editors with a tool that made it easy to create an engaging layout for new pages they create. In addition, these content blocks make the information on the page more digestible for users.
• We created a robust permission system setup that breaks departments into publishers and editors. This allows subordinates in a department to make content changes which they can then submit for review/approval to their department heads.
• We also implemented a Single Sign-On (SSO) which allows any Douglas County staff members with permissions to edit the website using their existing Microsoft Office 365 credentials for login. This consolidated the number of username/passwords staff members needed to do their job.
• We scheduled numerous training sessions with Douglas County staff to make sure they are all comfortable with how to use the new website and all the tools we created for them on the website. We also provide ongoing post-launch support whenever they have questions.
• We created a comprehensive website user’s guide to improve the staff user experience.

Solutions to Address the Needs of Douglas County Residents and Businesses

Most of the website goals associated with the needs of end users involved creating an exceptional user experience that made it easy for residents and businesses to find what they are looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible. To accomplish this, we devised a variety of solutions:

• We created a separate information architecture for each department, making information related to each department easier to find:
  • We streamlined the navigation and organized it into separate sections for Douglas County residents and businesses residing in Douglas County. Within each of these subdivisions, there are several different sections which organize all the information provided to users by department.
  • We created a landing page containing all the different offices, departments and divisions managed on the website. This allows users who know the department they’re looking for to navigate to it even more quickly.
  • Many of these departments have their own separate navigation off their main department page for even better usability. Since Douglas County staff in each department have control over the structure of these submenus, they can highlight the areas that are most useful for residents and businesses.
  • This strategy provides a highly intuitive and user-friendly way for people to find the information they need.
• 

  Douglas County website service finder tool

  We created a service finder tool that makes it easy for residents and business owners to search the website and find the services they need quickly. For example, if you need to get a fence permit, but don’t know which department manages this task, you can search for “fence permit” and you will automatically be directed to the correct page to apply for the permit. We also added some advanced functionality to this search tool to provide an enhanced user experience:

  • The search tool we used allows us to manually create synonyms. For example, if a resident searches for “license,” we can also show them results for “renewals” and “acceptable ID’s.”
  • The search tool also includes some “smart logic” that enables it to learn what people are searching for most often and adjust the top results accordingly.
  • The search index is hosted off site which dramatically speeds up results and allows for indexing all content (pages, blogs and documents).
• We created a section for elected officials that outlines who these officials are and provides their contact information, as well as other important information that residents may need to know. This section of the website makes it much easier for users to find information about their elected officials.

Solutions to Address Fiduciary Goals

We made a concerted effort to ensure our solutions addressed their fiduciary responsibility of taxpayer dollars.

When we started working with Douglas County, their existing website was hosted internally using Douglas County hardware that needed to be maintained and secured. Not only was this expensive, but they suffered many outages due to high traffic volume, especially during election times. To address this issue, we used a dedicated environment that is hosted in a tier 4 data center that is fault tolerant and redundant. In addition, our solution is specifically engineered to provide security and support for WordPress websites.

This solution reduces costs associated with maintenance, hosting and security, while also eliminating the issues experienced due to frequent outages. In addition, the Douglas County IT team are now able to focus on projects that provide more open access to data without having to worry about how residents and business owners will access this information. This has resulted in a significant savings of taxpayer money.

Solutions to Address ADA Requirements

ADA compliance report for Douglas County website

Government websites are constantly undergoing numerous updates. Therefore, it’s critical to have a strong process in place to ensure all ADA requirements are addressed whenever these updates are made. To accomplish this, we used a service called UserWay, which provides robust ADA compliance capabilities, including:

• WCAG 2.1 AA conformance
• Real-time accessibility monitoring and reports
• Full suite of 100+ AI-powered accessibility functions
• Custom remediation expertise from visually impaired testers
• Litigation protection up to $1 million

UserWay has a robust process to ensure ADA compliance. This includes:

• Automated scan of the website to identify any violations that are present and what needs to be done to correct them
• AI-powered widget that automatically corrects all violations
• Custom, manual remediations that aren’t addressed through the AI compliance script
• Real-world testing by accessibility experts with disabilities
• Ongoing monitoring and updates

Douglas County has a lot of team members adding content to the website, editing existing content and making updates to images. Therefore, we also provided comprehensive training for each department’s team members tasked with managing the website so that they understand how to make updates in a way that will meet all ADA requirements. The initial training allowed all team members to get up to speed, and then we provided numerous follow-up meetings with each department to provide additional support.

We also meet quarterly with each department to review ADA compliance reports with them and coach their team members on how to address any new compliance issues that developed since their last quarterly review meeting. It’s critical to have these regular reports and go through them with their team to make sure ADA requirements are being addressed for all the updates they make.

Our Innovative Solutions Addressed the Critical Needs of Douglas County

Dedicated section for elected officials for a better user experience

Measuring the success of government website projects is a little different than measuring the success of a new business website. Many of the traditional metrics used to gauge the success of a business website aren’t relevant to a government website.

The visitors who come to the Douglas County website are mostly predetermined. If you need information provided on their county website, or if you need to perform a task managed on the website, you will visit the site. If not, you won’t have a need to use their website.

Therefore, most of the information we can use to gauge the success of this project is anecdotal in nature. However, we have gotten very strong feedback from Douglas County staff regarding the process. Here’s what a few of their team members had to say:

“This was my third public sector website development experience, and by far the best. Webolutions’ overall knowledge in the space is unmatched. Communication was exemplary throughout the project. Webolutions’ system brought an extremely diverse and differently focused group of agencies and individuals onto the same page. Everyone felt their voices were heard. This fostered positive engagement throughout.”

~R. Gentry, IT/Communications Administrator, Douglas County

“This was truly an inclusive, whole team experience. Webolutions team members made sure we understood each step of the process and helped bring every step together. Confidence and understanding were continuously reinforced through relevant, proactive communications and prompt responses to ad hoc inquiries.”

~N. Quintana, Project Manager, Douglas County

Perhaps the most definitive feedback regarding the success of this project is the follow-up work we’ve received from Douglas County. Since the launch of their main website, they have asked us to build four additional websites for government programs that aren’t managed on the main website. Three of these are already live, and the fourth is in development.

View the main Douglas County, CO website.

Webolutions Can Build an Effective Website to Address the Specific Needs of Your Government Agency

Our team’s experience working on the Douglas County website provides us with the framework and experience to navigate the unique and varied challenges associated with complex government websites. Our meticulous planning and solution-oriented approach to website design and development will set your project up for success and ensure your agency receives the robust functionality to address all your needs.

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading web design company since 1994. We’ve developed a unique Websites Right Methodology™ that incorporates the experience, knowledge and lessons learned from building thousands of websites over 30 years. This fully integrated, strategic approach to website design and development creates a better client experience and results in a superior website that is designed to provide innovative solutions for the specific goals and challenges associated with your project.

The customization provided by our Websites Right Methodology™ is ideally suited to address the needs of government websites. It will free you from the constraints associated with traditional government website templates and provide you with greater control over the final product. This will allow you to more effectively address the needs of your staff and your end users.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions is a Denver web design company serving clients nationwide.

The post Douglas County Web Design Project: Solving the Diverse Challenges Associated with a Government Website appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

There are different specialists required to ensure the visual and technical aspects of your website work properly – web designers and web developers. While these two professionals work together and have some overlapping roles, their skillsets are somewhat distinct. They play a complementary role in bringing your website to life, and both are equally critical to the success of your digital marketing efforts.

One of the benefits of working with a website design and development company is that there will be optimal levels of collaboration between your website designer and developer. This ensures proper alignment between the website design and website development aspects of the process, allowing you to have a highly performing website that conveys your brand messaging, generates leads, and grows your business.

What Does a Website Designer Do?

What Does a Website Designer Do?

The website designer creates the visual and graphical elements of your website. They focus on the overall layout, aesthetics and usability of the website. Your web designer works to make sure your website is visually appealing and provides a good user experience.

The key elements of your website that are handled by the web designer include:

• Layout and design – The overall layout and design determines how important items such as logos, navigation menus, headers, footers, text, and graphical/video elements are arranged on each page.
• Branding and colors – Your website should convey your company’s brand. This includes any logos, icons, colors and fonts associated with your branding. When these elements are addressed properly on your website, it helps you make a better connection with your audience and ensures your website will look and feel consistent with your other marketing assets.
• Graphics – The graphical elements of your website refer to any photos, illustrations, infographics and other images used. The graphical elements your website designer chooses should complement your branding and enhance the overall layout of your site.
• Hierarchy – The visual hierarchy plays an important role in your ability to make a good impression on users, attract potential leads, collect user information and generate sales. An effective hierarchy will ensure calls to action (CTAs), headers and graphical elements are placed in a way that will most effectively achieve your marketing goals.
• Navigation – One of the most important functions associated with website design is making sure users can easily move around the site to find the info they’re looking for. The navigation structure plays a critical role in accomplishing this function. An effective navigation menu should be highly visible, easily accessible and intuitive. Websites with a poor navigation structure will make it hard for users to find what they need, resulting in a poor experience that may drive visitors away from your site.

Read our Helpful Web Design and Development Articles

Types of Website Designers

Types of Website Designers

There are specializations within the web designer role. Each of these specializations is critical to the success of your website. While some designers may be able to perform all these roles, it is also common for web design and development agencies to have different designers who specialize in each niche:

• User Experience (UX) Designer – The role of the UX designer is to make sure the website is structured in an engaging way that provides a good experience for all visitors interacting with it. In order to accomplish this, they must conduct thorough research into the demographics and needs of your target audience and test a variety of options to arrive at the design that will most effectively engage your audience and keep them coming back again.
• User Interface (UI) Designer – While the UX designer creates the foundation for a strong user experience, the UI designer works to ensure the website aesthetics (the look and feel) is designed in a way that will maximize conversions. This role is responsible for creating the graphics and typography that will optimize the layout of your website. The UI designer also creates a variety of elements such as CTA buttons, dropdown menus, navigational components, data fields and message boxes that make it easier for the user to interact with your website and complete your desired actions.
• Visual Designer – The visual designer combines certain aspects of the UX and UI design roles to make sure the website is both easy to use and visually appealing. They help bring your brand’s style and tone to life in order to improve the user journey.

What Does a Website Developer Do?

The website developer performs the behind-the-scenes coding and programming that allows your website to function properly. The developer works to bring the designer’s ideas to life by constructing the actual website. Website developers must work closely with the designer(s) in order to ensure all the design elements of the website work properly.

The key elements of your website that are handled by the web developer include:

• Programming – Front-end coding languages such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript are used to convert the design into a fully functioning website.
• Optimization – Whether they are building a custom website or working off of a website theme from a third-party platform such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, developers optimize the website by eliminating any unnecessary code that will cause it to be bloated and slow. In addition, the optimization process involves making sure the website will function properly and provide a great experience on all devices (desktop, tablet and mobile) by implementing best practices such as responsive design.
• Structure – Developers are responsible for making sure the coding of your website is structured properly. This improves load time, even for very large, complex websites.
• CMS operations – It’s common to build websites using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress. When these platforms are used, developers must be able to manipulate the framework of the existing CMS to ensure your website’s design is integrated properly.

Types of Website Developers

Types of Website Developers

As with designers, there are specializations within the web developer role. Each specialization is critical to the success of your website. In general, website developers can be classified into the following roles:

• Front-end developer – Front-end developers are responsible for the coding and programming of the visual elements of the website that the user experiences and interacts with. They bring all of these elements to life in the finished website, ensuring it has the proper look and feel that will resonate with your target audience. This includes just about everything that your website users see, such as colors, text styles, images and graphics, buttons, forms and the navigation menu. In addition, the front-end developer is responsible for making sure the website works properly on all devices.
• Back-end developer – Back-end developers are responsible building the elements of the website that exist “behind the scenes.” In other words, they work on the part of the website that isn’t visible to end users. They use advanced programming languages to create the code for the servers and databases that store and arrange your website data. They’re also responsible for website testing and fixing any bugs that are identified during testing.
• Full stack developers – In some instances, you’ll have a website developer who can perform all the front-end and back-end coding. These individuals are called full stack developers.

Designers and Developers Both Help Create an Engaging User Experience

Website designers and developers work together in a complementary manner to build your website, and both are critical to the success of the project. While they perform distinct roles, they both play an important role in creating an engaging user experience that sets your website up for success.

Delivering a great user experience is one of the most important goals of the process, as this will ensure your audience has a positive reaction whenever they visit your website and are more likely to return. If your website provides a poor user experience, you’re much more likely to see visitors leave quickly and seek solutions for their pain points from one of your competitors who provide a better experience.

Both web designers and web developers contribute to your ability to create a great user experience. The designer achieves this goal by making sure your website looks engaging, is easy to navigate, and clearly directs users towards the desired actions they should take. The developer achieves this goal by making sure the website functions properly, loads quickly and looks good on any device used to view it.

What Are the Main Differences Between the Website Designer and Developer Roles?

What’s the Difference Between a Website Designer and a Website Developer?

Due to the complementary nature of these roles, there is some crossover between their skill sets. However, these are two distinct roles and while your website designer and developer work together to build a high performing website, there are many elements of their jobs that are wholly different from one another.

Website Designers Do Not Write the Code

While some designers may have a working knowledge of coding best practices, they aren’t responsible for writing the code or programming your website. Coding isn’t involved in any of the primary tasks associated with enhancing the visual experience of the website, such as developing visual assets, designing CTA buttons, creating mockups and designing layouts.

Website Developers Do Not Create Assets

Website developers, on the other hand, do not play a role in creating the visual assets that contribute to the aesthetic appeal of the website. Instead, the developer writes the code to ensure these visual elements function properly when they appear on the website.

Webolutions Can Help You Build a Website That Grows Your Business

Due to the highly specialized nature of these two roles, it’s important to work with a website company that provides both website design and development services. When you work with an agency that has both in-house designers and developers, it will allow for greater collaboration and alignment between these two important components of the process.

At Webolutions, we have the specialists needed to build a website that performs well, engages your audience, generates leads and grows your business. We’ve been building websites since 1994, when the internet was in its infancy. We’ve witnessed firsthand how website best practices have evolved over the past three decades, and our team possesses the expertise necessary to build a website that sets all your marketing efforts up for success.

You’ll benefit from our unique Websites Right Methodology™ which provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to website development. This exclusive approach has been refined over nearly 30 years and incorporates the knowledge and lessons learned from designing thousands of websites. Our Websites Right Methodology™ utilizes a meticulous process that creates a far better client experience and results in superior website marketing performance that elevates your business results.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post What’s the Difference Between a Website Designer and a Website Developer? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In a recent blog post, our CEO and founder, John Vachalek, outlined the fundamental building blocks necessary to establish and maintain a strong market leadership position. If you haven’t already read this piece, we strongly recommend that you do, as it will provide you with a blueprint for how to build the infrastructure necessary to emerge as a market leader.

However, building this infrastructure isn’t enough to secure your place as a market leader. This work must also be accompanied by a product or service offering that stands above those delivered by your competitors.

If your current offering has placed you in position to attain a status as a market leader, then you’ve cleared one of the critical hurdles to achieving this goal. By following the steps outlined in our previous blog, you will be well on your way to establishing your market leadership position. But if your offering doesn’t position you to truly stand out as a market leader, the following tips will help you refine your offering so that you can deliver the transformational value that is typically associated with market leadership.

Choose a Niche

Unless you have a proprietary technology, design, intellectual property, or other solution that stands above the other businesses currently entrenched as established industry leaders, it can often be challenging to demonstrate that your offering surpasses the tried-and-true options that are already on your audience’s radar. Instead of trying to wedge your way into such intense competition, you can specialize in a specific niche of your industry.

Specializing in a niche allows you to target a much narrower market. While there may be less of a demand for your niche offering than there would be if you target a broader market, there will also be considerably less competition. This will make it much easier to establish yourself as a market leader, allowing you to capture a larger percentage of the market associated with your specific niche.

Make Sure Your Offering Is Remarkable

Even in a niche market, you will still have some competitors with a similar specialization. While you won’t have to stand out in as crowded of a field, you will still need to stand out. The best way to do this is by offering something remarkable or exceptional.

There are two components to offering something remarkable. First and foremost, your offering needs to be high quality and provide the solution your audience needs. However, this will only position your offering as a commodity, leaving you vulnerable to a competitor stealing your leadership position in the future. In order to have a truly remarkable offering, it must also provide a transformational experience for your customers/clients.

A great example of a company making their offering remarkable is Apple with the iPod. There were several other mp3 players entering the market at the same time Apple released the iPod, but Apple was able to quickly establish their product as the market leader, allowing them to dominate the competition.

How did they do this? By creating an offering that provided a transformative experience. The iPod looked slick and provided an easy to use click wheel that stood out as unique compared with the other options. The iPod also quickly became synonymous with a trendy, hip lifestyle that gave its users tremendous joy and pleasure. This transformative experience made it much more than a music player, and it helped Apple corner the market.

Don’t Wait for Perfection to Launch

You can’t be a market leader without an offering. If you wait for perfection, you’ll never launch your product or service. Instead, launch as soon as you feel your offering is quality and then iterate as needed to continuously improve.

Despite your most herculean efforts, no product or service offering will ever be perfect, especially at the time of launch. However, if you ask your customers for feedback and make changes to address their needs and concerns, you can quickly turn a good offering into a great one, albeit still an imperfect one. By launching quickly and innovating after launch, you can stay on the forefront of the needs of your customers and remain ahead of your competitors.

Prioritize Customer Satisfaction

Satisfied customers are essential to be considered a market leader. If your customers aren’t happy with your offering, they will seek these products/services from a competitor in the future.

In today’s social media driven world, customers have a greater ability than ever before to shape the narrative surrounding the quality of your offering and the experience you provide to your customers/clients. The comments people make on social media and the reviews they leave about your offering can significantly impact the way others will view your business. According to research conducted by customer service professionals at Dixa:

• 93% of individuals read online reviews before making a purchase
• 79% of individuals place as much weight on online reviews as they do on personal recommendations
• 86% of individuals are hesitant to do business with a company that has negative online reviews

Your offering must not only be high quality, but it must meet or exceed the expectations of your customers/clients. When this occurs, it will turn your customers into brand ambassadors for your business, making it much easier to elevate to the status of market leader.

Conversely, negative feedback on social media and poor online reviews can tank your reputation, making it extremely challenging to be viewed as a market leader. If you receive negative feedback via reviews or social media, make sure to address these problems directly with the customers leaving these reviews, and use their feedback to improve the experience your offering provides in the future.

Invest in a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

Once you have a strong offering that delivers an amazing experience to your customers/clients, you need to spread the word about your offering. Building a comprehensive marketing strategy that effectively conveys your brand messaging, tells your story and lets your audience know that your offering is first rate is essential to ascending to a market leadership position.

Since we live in a digital age, the bulk of your efforts should focus on digital marketing strategies. By building a strong website that is supported by quality content, social media marketing and regular email newsletters, you can educate your audience on the benefits they’ll receive when they choose your offering over your competitors. Over time, this will help establish your business as a known entity in your market. As you become known for delivering a quality offering and amazing customer experience, you’ll begin to be viewed as a market leader.

Webolutions Can Help

As a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation agency, Webolutions has been helping businesses across the country effectively bring their unique stories to life for nearly three decades. Our purpose is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive, and we can help your business establish the framework necessary to become a market leader.

Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been crafted to help you grow your business faster, smarter and easier. This approach helps you to clarify what is special about you as a company, allowing you to more effectively brand and market your business. Through our collaborative, expert-led journey, you’ll begin to see the world through a new lens and develop the tools necessary to establish and maintain a market leadership position within your competitive industry landscape.

To speak with one of our experts about how you can implement these strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-997-3465 or contact us today. During your free 60-minute market leadership consultation, we’ll help you start creating a plan for success.

The post Refine Your Offering to Become a Market Leader appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Website Design and Development

If you’re considering building a new website for your business, you may be wondering what type of company to work with on the project. Is it better to hire a web design company that focuses all of their energy on website design and development, or is it better to hire a digital marketing agency that can also provide the comprehensive digital marketing services you need to complement your new website?

While it may seem like working with a company that specializes in web design services is the smart approach, this typically won’t set your business up for success long term. A web design company can build you a website that looks great, but it will most likely lack the other important elements necessary to ensure you end up with a high performing website that drives leads and helps you grow your business.

There are many reasons why you’ll experience better results when you have a digital marketing agency build your website.

Your Digital Marketing Strategy Should Dictate the Specifics of Your Website Design

Why Your Digital Marketing Agency Should Build Your Website

Your website is the centerpiece of your marketing strategy and therefore, it must be optimized to achieve your marketing goals. You’re much more likely to achieve a website built to convert leads, increase sales and grow your business if it is designed within the framework of your digital marketing strategy. If you don’t have your strategy dictate the specifics of your website design, you run the risk that it won’t deliver the performance necessary to deliver your desired results.

When you have a digital marketing agency build your website, you’ll benefit from working with a team of marketing professionals with years of experience creating comprehensive marketing plans to help businesses grow. This ensures your website will be designed with conversion goals in mind from the earliest stages of the project.

One of the ways a digital marketing agency will ensure your new website is built with conversions in mind is by creating a set of detailed buyer personas prior to building the website. This ensures your marketing company understands the behaviors exhibited by your target audience and the messaging that will most resonate with them.

In addition, by working with you to develop your digital marketing strategy prior to building your website, the agency will have a concrete understanding of the specific elements required on your website to achieve your desired goals. This may include:

• Creating a lead magnet piece and accompanying landing page to capture the contact information of leads who will be placed into an email marketing campaign
• Building in complex ecommerce functionality that allows you to sell your products directly to customers from your website
• Creating a series of PPC landing pages to optimize any paid search campaigns you plan to run
• Ensuring you have content to address every stage of the marketing funnel
• Aligning the content and messaging on your website with your social media marketing strategy to ensure there is consistency across all channels

A web design company won’t be working with you to develop your digital marketing strategy and as a result, they won’t have the detailed understanding of what is entailed in this plan or the goals you’re trying to achieve. Therefore, you are much less likely to end up with a website that is optimized to achieve these goals.

Your Website Will Be Designed to Accentuate Your Branding

Your website is one of the most effective tools at your disposal to convey your brand messaging to your audience. A well-crafted brand message creates a series of positive associations between your company, what you stand for, and the moments of happiness you bring to people’s lives. When done effectively, your brand will resonate with your audience on a deep level that goes well beyond simply promoting the products and services you offer. This is critical to building a successful marketing strategy.

Your brand themes should incorporate three critical elements:

• Your offering
• Your culture
• The unique experience you provide

This information should drive the creation of your brand messaging. In order to effectively convey this messaging to your audience, it must be consistently displayed throughout your website as well as in all of your supplemental marketing assets.

When you work with a digital marketing agency, they will help you craft your brand story, and this will become a key differentiator that allows you stand out from your competitors. Having the marketing professionals who craft your brand messaging build your website ensures that this messaging is highlighted throughout the website. It will also be present in your social media profiles, your paid search campaigns, your email marketing campaigns, and every other aspect of your marketing strategy.

When a web design company builds your website, certain elements of your branding, such as your brand colors, typography and imagery, will be incorporated into your website. However, the deeper elements of your brand story are less likely to be accentuated in your website, and this can hurt your ability to connect with your target audience.

Your Website Will Contain Multiple Calls to Action Optimized for Conversions

The primary goals of your website are to generate leads, increase revenue and grow your business. In order to accomplish this, you must have effective calls to action (CTAs) strategically placed throughout your website.

In addition, it’s important that your website feature CTAs that target every stage of the buyer’s journey since not everyone who visits your website will be ready to become a customer. Therefore, you need to include:

• Direct CTAs that target individuals ready to make a decision, such as:
  • Schedule a consultation
  • Buy now
  • Get started
• Transitional CTAs that target individuals who are still in the earlier phases of their decision making process, such as:
  • Subscribe to our newsletter
  • Download our free guide
  • Join our community
  • Schedule a demo
  • Request a free trial

A digital marketing agency will be judged on how effectively they generate leads and increase your revenue, so you can be confident they will make sure effective CTAs are implemented consistently throughout your website. In addition, they will know the best practices for how to utilize these CTAs, such as:

• The best colors to use to make your CTAs stand out on the page
• The ideal location to place your CTAs on the page
• Which CTAs belong on specific pages to increase the likelihood that they will convert
• The ideal landing pages and forms to create to maximize conversions

While a web design company may include some CTAs on your website, they typically lack the extensive marketing knowledge and experience to ensure your CTAs are leveraged for maximum effect.

Your Website Will Be Designed According to SEO Best Practices

Your website won’t be a powerful lead generation tool if your audience can’t find it. Therefore, designing your website with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind is critical to achieving your desired results.

Most web design companies lack the SEO knowledge and experience to build a website that will rank well. This typically requires the expertise of an SEO specialist. When your website is built by a digital marketing agency, you will benefit from having an SEO professional on the team. This will ensure that your website is build according to SEO best practices.

A digital marketing agency will utilize a variety of tactics to ensure your website is built with SEO in mind:

• Extensive keyword research will be conducted at the onset of the project to ensure your navigation outline contains the pages necessary to rank for the keywords that will be most critical to your success
• Site speed improvements will be implemented to ensure the your page loading speed is as fast as possible (this is an important factor in Google’s search ranking algorithm)
• A mobile friendly, responsive design will be used to ensure your website provides an exceptional experience on all mobile devices (another important factor in Google’s algorithm)
• Content will be written to support your target keywords to ensure these pages contain the information needed to rank well
• On-page optimization will be performed to ensure the correct title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags and links are used to help improve page rankings
• Your website will contain an effective information architecture, making it easy for users to navigate the website and providing Google with strong signals regarding which pages are most important to rank

If you don’t work with a company who has the expertise necessary to design your website with SEO best practices in mind, you’re going to miss out on a lot of traffic that can generate leads and grow your business.

You’ll Have a Cohesive Content Marketing Strategy to Help Grow Your Business

Content is a critical component of your website. It provides a variety of important functions:

• Helps you tell your story so that your audience can understand what your company stands for
• Provides educational information that builds trust with your audience
• Establishes your business as an industry thought leader, helping you gain credibility
• Supports SEO efforts, making it easier for your audience to find your website
• Provides information that can be reposted on social media platforms to further increase your reach and grow your audience
• Allows you to provide value to your clients in exchange for their contact information (using lead magnet pieces) in order to support your email marketing efforts

A digital marketing agency will be able to provide the content marketing services necessary to drive the results you need:

• They will be able to create the high quality content that resonates with your audience
• They will know how to construct your content in a way that supports your SEO efforts
• They will be able to craft a long-term content plan that drives every component of your digital marketing strategy
• They will make sure you have content that addresses every persona in your target audience and that hits every phase of the buyer’s journey

Most web design companies won’t have an experienced content team in-house. This means your team may be responsible for creating the quality content you need. Most businesses lack both the time to create the large quantity of content needed for a new website project and the knowledge necessary to ensure this content maximizes your marketing performance.

You’ll Generate the Right Intelligence Data to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Efforts

One of the benefits of digital marketing compared to traditional marketing is that you have access to a wealth of data that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and provide insights on how to improve your results over time. When your website is built by a digital marketing agency, they will have a clear understanding of your overall marketing goals from the outset of the project. This will allow them to compile all relevant data and set up the proper testing to evaluate your performance. As they run your ongoing marketing after your website launches, your digital marketing agency will leverage this intelligence data to improve your results and help your business grow.

Webolutions Can Create a High Performing Website That Grows Your Business

Webolutions Web Design Company

If you’re in need of a new website for your business, Webolutions can help. As Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, we provide the comprehensive digital marketing services necessary to help your business grow and thrive.

We’ve been ranked among Denver’s largest web designers/developers by the Denver Business Journal every year since 2002, and our award winning websites have delivered the exceptional marketing results our clients need.

Our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™ has been developed and refined over the past three decades based on our extensive experience building thousands of websites. This fully integrated, strategic approach to website development delivers a better client experience and vastly superior marketing performance. Our Websites Right Methodology™ sets you up for success by:

• Creating a collaborative process that documents your website goals at the start of the project so that we can measure success during the development process and over time after the website goes live
• Planning your home page key elements in detail to ensure this important page of your website effectively conveys your brand story
• Creating detailed website mockups to ensure the design looks right and exceeds your expectations before we build the website
• Documenting all functional requirements before building the website to ensure everyone involved in the project is aligned on what is expected
• Creating a comprehensive project plan that details all deadlines and keeps the project moving forward
• Providing weekly status updates to keep your team aware of our progress and ensure you always know when it’s time for you to provide specific assets or complete certain tasks
• Utilizing a variety of third-party tools to enhance your website’s functionality
• Performing custom programming and development to ensure all functionality requirements are implemented properly
• Performing comprehensive pre-launch website testing to ensure the website functions properly and provides a great experience on all browsers and devices
• Providing tactical content leadership to convey your story and establish your business as a thought leader
• Utilizing SEO best practices to improve your search rankings
• Conducting post-launch testing and ongoing analysis to ensure your website delivers the exceptional results you need year after year

This meticulous approach to website design, along with the extensive digital marketing services we provide, will set your business up for greater success. We can help you build a website that maximizes the ROI on your marketing efforts, helping you generate more leads, increase your revenue and grow your business.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post Why Your Digital Marketing Agency Should Build Your Website appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Lead generation is a critical task for every business. You need quality leads to expand your customer base and achieve consistent, sustained growth. But lead generation isn’t a straightforward process. As marketing tactics become increasingly sophisticated, lead generation strategies have become more challenging to execute effectively.

When developing and executing your lead generation strategy, there are important items that must be addressed to ensure you achieve your goals. The following guide will help you optimize your lead generation strategy to hit your goals and ensure you’re providing your sales team with quality leads that can turn into the types of clients that will help you grow your business.

Set Business Lead Generation Goals

Before you can develop your lead generation strategy, you must understand what you’re trying to achieve. Your lead generation goals should align with your overall business growth objectives:

• What are your company’s desired growth projections?
• Are there certain segments of your customer base that are more valuable to focus on than others?

Set Your Lead Generation Goals

When developing your lead generation goals, it’s always best to focus on quality over quantity. High quality, sales-ready leads are much more likely to convert than generic leads consisting of prospects that may not be truly interested in your products/services or that may not have the budget to take advantage of what you have to offer.

By focusing on qualified leads, you can streamline your efforts and get a better return on your investment. A qualified lead possesses certain characteristics that your team believes will either make them more likely to convert into a customer or more likely to generate your desired level of revenue per customer. Once you determine the criteria for your qualified leads, you can more effectively target this audience with your marketing efforts.

In many instances, you’ll be able to reduce the number of leads you need to generate per month by focusing on qualified leads. For example, if your conversion rate for qualified leads is 20% and your conversion rate for general leads is 10%, you’ll be able to generate the same number of new customers with fewer leads when your sales team is primarily speaking to qualified prospects. In addition, if these qualified leads generate twice as much revenue as non-qualified prospects, then you can achieve your new customer revenue goals with half the number of sales.

Establish Your Lead Generation Metrics

In order to improve your lead generation results and hit your goals, you must have a way to measure the performance of your efforts. This requires establishing a series of metrics that will help your team track their success over time.

Some good lead generation metrics to track include:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Cost per lead (CPL)
• Customer lifetime value
• Cost per marketing lead by channel

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This refers to the amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer. This cost may include advertising expenses, salaries for your marketing and sales teams, market research costs, and any other financial expenditure associated with the process of bringing on new customers.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

This measures the amount of money spent in your marketing campaign to generate a new lead for your sales team to pursue. The cost per lead can vary based on the marketing channel used to generate this lead. For example, the cost per lead may be different for paid search ads (PPC) than Facebook ads. In addition, the cost for each of these may be different than the cost per lead generated by organic SEO.

Knowing your cost per lead helps you determine whether you’re apportioning your marketing budget properly throughout each channel in your campaign to achieve the best ROI.

Customer Lifetime Value

This metric lets you know how much revenue an average customer will generate over the lifetime of their business relationship with you. Knowing your customer lifetime value will help you make important decisions regarding the monetary resources you invest in acquiring new customers vs. retaining existing customers.

Cost Per Lead by Marketing Channel

Most lead generation strategies leverage multiple marketing channels to achieve their goals. But not all marketing channels will deliver the same results. Your cost of acquiring a lead may vary significantly from channel to channel.

Understanding the variance in these costs will help you focus your efforts on the channels which bring in the most quality leads at an affordable cost. Without knowing this figure, it’s very hard to understand which marketing channels deliver the best value to your business.

Optimize Your CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is an extremely valuable tool for your business. A CRM manages all of your relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. If you’re still tracking this information with a spreadsheet, we highly recommend that you upgrade to a CRM as soon as possible.

Tips to Generate Business Leads

When fully optimized, your CRM is a powerful tool that can help you maximize your ROI on your lead generation efforts. To get the most out of this software, you should take the following steps:

• Automate inbound lead qualification to ensure your sales team is pursuing the highest quality leads you’ve generated
• Set up your CRM to track the key data points which separate qualified leads from other leads
• Automate the process of passing new leads from your marketing team to your sales team
• Periodically review old leads to identify potential missed opportunities

Leverage Your Existing Customers for Referrals

Often, happy customers can be a powerful lead generation tool. They can offer a more objective assessment of the customer experience you provide than is possible from your internal messaging. They can speak to the quality of your products/services, the level of customer service you provide, and help prospects understand what to expect when they work with you. They also provide their colleagues and other contacts with a trusted source of information.

For this reason, leads generated by customer referrals deliver a much better ROI than leads generated by other marketing channels. Referral leads:

• Convert 30% better than leads from other marketing channels
• Have a 16% higher lifetime value
• Have a 37% higher retention rate
• Are 4 times more likely to refer other new customers to your brand

Creating a referral program is an easy way to get your existing customers to spread the word about your business. As part of this program, reward your customers with a discount if they send a new prospect your way.

Optimize Your Lead Generation Content

As part of your marketing efforts, it’s important to create content specifically geared towards lead generation. This may include:

• Lead Magnets – High quality, high engagement content that your audience can access in exchange for their email address. This may include guides, eBooks, case studies, reports, cheat sheets, templates, free trials, checklists, or any other material that may help your audience address their pain points.
• CTAs – Creating compelling calls to action (CTAs) that are strategically placed throughout your website will help increase the number of visitors who take your desired action. Whether your audience is being asked to download a lead magnet, sign up for your newsletter, schedule a consultation, or sign up for your webinar, these are powerful tools to generate leads.
• Landing Pages – Landing pages are an effective tool that will take the people visiting your website and convert them into leads. These landing pages are where your audience will arrive when they click on a CTA associated with your lead magnet. The more landing pages on your website, the better. Businesses with over 40 landing pages generate significantly more leads than businesses with only a few landing pages. The reason for this is that creating multiple landing pages for each lead magnet provides you with more opportunities to convert your audience.

The best way to ensure you’re maximizing the effectiveness of your lead generation content is to perform a content audit. As part of this audit, evaluate:

• Consistency – Your messaging should be consistent throughout all lead generation content pieces and include talking points explaining what makes your products/services valuable and unique.
• Appeal – What’s in it for your audience? To convert more leads, your content should communicate the most appealing benefits that will create a transformation in your audience.
• Keywords – Your content must contain target keywords which will be used by your audience to find a solution to their pain points and/or locate the types of products/services you offer. Make sure to conduct keyword research to ensure you’re focusing on the right phrases.
• Headlines – Make sure your headlines, email subject lines and lead magnet titles are engaging and communicate the value provided by the content.

Drive Traffic to Your Lead Generation Content

Once you’re confident that your lead generation content is optimized for conversions, it’s time to put effort into making sure this content is found by your target audience. There are a variety of methods to drive traffic to your lead magnets, and the right solution(s) for you will depend on your overall lead generation strategy.

For example, if your lead generation campaign relies on paid search, you’ll want to identify the right PPC campaigns to target your desired audience. On the other hand, if you’re looking for organic traffic, you’ll need to:

• Create a series of SEO-focused pages and blog posts that will help you rank well for your target keyword phrases
• Develop a backlink strategy to drive links to your lead magnets from external sources
• Promote your SEO content on social media to ensure your content reaches a wider audience and gets shared by people who follow your pages (a large volume of shares will typically have a positive impact on your search rankings)

When trying to drive traffic to your lead magnets, always refer back to your buyer personas to ensure you’re using the content types and traffic sources that align with their interests and preferences.

Utilize Lead Scoring and Nurturing Tools

As we discussed earlier, not all leads are created equal. To maximize the ROI on your lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to focus your energy on qualified leads. In addition, you need to take steps to increase the likelihood these qualified leads make it all the way through your sales funnel and become new customers. This is accomplished by scoring and nurturing your leads.

Lead scoring makes it easier to prioritize leads based on whether they are considered qualified. When using lead scoring tools, you have the ability to identify the important factors to use when evaluating the quality of leads. These may include:

• Purchase readiness
• Sale amount
• Annual company revenues
• Expected customer lifetime value

Lead scoring can help you focus your efforts on the qualified clients that are most likely to help you grow your business. However, not all of these leads will be ready to become a customer. Therefore, it’s important to implement lead nurturing strategies that will ensure you continuously engage these prospects and move them farther down the sales funnel. While there are a variety of tools that will help you nurture leads, the most effective approach is to use your CRM to manage this task.

Utilize Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques

Even when you take all of these steps, there will always be room for improvement over time. All lead generation strategies require ongoing adjustments to ensure you’re getting the best ROI on your efforts. Therefore, it’s important to leverage conversion rate optimization techniques that will help you identify the most important and impactful adjustments to make to your strategy.

Conversion rate optimization is a process used to increase the percentage of conversions you achieve from your lead generation efforts. This process involves testing the different conversion elements on your website, landing pages, CTAs, and email marketing content to identify what’s working most effectively and what needs improvement.

There are a variety of conversion rate optimization tools available to help you continuously improve the ROI on your efforts. You should also invest in an A/B testing tool to complement your conversion rate optimization efforts.

Optimize Your Sales Process

All the steps discussed above are designed to help you generate more leads, and more importantly, ensure you’re generating the qualified leads necessary to grow your business. However, these leads won’t do your business any good unless you’re able to turn them into paying customers. To get the most out of your lead generation efforts, you’ll want to devote time to optimizing your sales process as well.

In most situations, the sales process involves an extended journey. Each point in the journey provides an opportunity for your team to build trust with a lead, convey the transformation they’ll experience from your product/service, and get them more engaged with your business. However, each point in the journey also has the potential to create a moment for the lead to lose interest and either stall in the funnel or drop off completely. Optimizing your sales process will help you avoid this pitfall.

To make sure your sales team is equipped to make the most of each opportunity along the journey, you need to constantly evaluate your process and provide coaching to your sales team. Record your sales calls and listen back to them with your sales team. Highlight areas in the call that went well and areas where your sales team failed to answer questions confidently or stay on message. Make updates to your sales script based on the issues you identify when listening to these calls, and provide your sales team with any support necessary to improve the effectiveness of these calls.

Webolutions Can Help You Improve Your Lead Generation Efforts

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. For nearly three decades, we’ve been providing comprehensive marketing services to help our clients reach their goals and enjoy greater success. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been developed with your success in mind, and it allows you to grow your business faster, smarter and easier.

This unique approach to marketing leads you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about your company. As part of this journey, we’ll establish your industry leading marketing positioning to clearly differentiate you from your competitors. This information will drive every aspect of your marketing campaign, and it will allow us to craft a customized lead generation strategy that provides an irresistible customer journey geared towards increasing conversions.

At Webolutions, we believe every decision regarding your lead generation strategy should be dictated by the data. To ensure we’re providing the best ROI on your efforts, we’re constantly A/B testing your lead generation strategy and recommending the improvements necessary to improve your results over time.

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

The post How to Hit Your Lead Generation Goals appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

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.

In order to make the best decision regarding your new website, it’s important to first understand the difference between custom web design and template websites. By understanding what is capable with each option, you can determine which solution is right for you.

What Is a Custom Website?

As the name implies, a custom website is tailored to address the unique needs and goals of your business. Your website will be built completely from scratch in order to ensure it meets your specifications and possesses the functionality necessary for your business to grow and thrive. Because it is completely customized, your website will have a unique look and feel that stands apart from all other websites – both in your industry and other industries.

While custom web design provides a truly unique look and feel, it accomplishes much more than this. It also involves creating specific back-end coding that will deliver the advanced functionality, navigation architecture, features and integrations necessary to achieve your goals. Due to the intensive planning, extensive design and development work, and increased complexities associated with these websites, it’s crucial to work with an experienced custom web design company if you choose this option.

What Is a Template Website?

Template websites use a pre-designed layout that dictates how the website will be constructed. These templates make designing a website much faster, easier and cheaper, but they also create significant limitations regarding your website’s look and feel, advanced functionality, and the ability to truly cater your website to the specific needs of your business.

For businesses trying to build their website on their own, template website options provide the DIY capabilities you need. However, you will also lose out on the support and technical expertise provided by an experienced custom web design agency. These limitations in support and customization make it much more challenging to maximize your website’s ability to function optimally as a marketing tool.

Learn more about Webolutions Website Design and Development Services

Which Option Is Right for Me?

Due to the significant limitations associated with template websites, they typically underperform compared with custom websites. If your business is looking to achieve the best ROI on your website marketing efforts, you are almost always better off going with a custom website. However, there may be certain instances when a template website may be the right solution for your needs. When deciding between the two, make sure to evaluate how important each of the following criteria are to your business:

• Conveying your brand
• Functionality
• Scalability
• SEO results
• Time to build
• Cost

Conveying Your Brand

Your brand is essential to the identity of your business. It provides a memory bank of positive associations between your company and the moments of happiness it creates in people’s lives based on what it stands for. A strong brand makes it easier for your audience to identify with your business and understand what they can expect when they purchase your products and services. Effective branding creates an emotional connection that strengthens your ability to obtain new customers and retain existing ones.

Your website is one of the most important tools at your disposal to convey your brand messaging to your audience. Since growing your brand is crucial to the success of your business, a website that more effectively conveys your branding will perform much better than one that limits your ability to grow your brand.

Template websites are extremely limited in their ability to convey your branding and differentiate your business from your competitors. You are constrained in your ability to change color schemes, typography, layout, and many other items which are critical to conveying your brand. Instead, you will have a generic looking website that will make it more challenging to stand out from your competitors.

Custom websites, on the other hand, give you a blank slate. You can choose a color scheme that incorporates your brand colors, typography that matches your branding, and custom imagery that promotes your brand story. You can create a unique layout for your website that is appealing to your target audience and feels completely different from other websites. This will not only more effectively convey your brand, but it will also help you stand out from your competitors.

Advantage: Custom websites

Functionality

Just as website templates limit your ability to achieve a unique look and feel which conveys your brand, they also possess significant limitations in the functionality they offer. If you only need a very simple website, this may not be a problem. However, most businesses typically need a website that possesses greater functionality than can be achieved with a template.

There are a variety of ways in which a template website may potentially restrict the specific functionality requirements your business may have:

• Mobile-friendly design – The vast majority of people view websites on their phones, and a mobile-friendly website has become essential both for user experience and improved SEO Unfortunately, many website templates do not offer responsive design capabilities, limiting your ability to provide a good user experience on mobile devices.
• Ecommerce – Custom websites are essential for businesses looking for ecommerce capabilities. While many website template platforms offer effective ecommerce solutions, they are often very confusing and challenging to get to work properly. For example, most template ecommerce websites do a very poor job reconciling taxes associated with sales generated on your website. For seamless ecommerce website functionality that provides your team with an excellent user experience, custom websites provide far superior results.
• Security – Website hackers are more sophisticated than ever, making website security an essential for all businesses. Template websites are much more susceptible to hackers because a breach to the template provider’s system puts every website using their templates at risk. Custom websites provide significantly more advanced security, making it much harder for cyber attacks to bring down your website.
• User experience – Your website’s user experience must be created strategically in order to not only ensure that it’s easy for your audience to find what they need, but that they are also guided towards interacting with the specific conversion elements you’ve added to drive business. Custom websites allow you to set up a user experience focused on the specific needs of both your business and your audience. Template websites lack the customization necessary to deliver a user experience that will drive conversions.

Advantage: Custom websites

Scalability

If you think back to the early days of your business, it most likely looked a lot different than it does now. Growth creates change. As your business continues to grow and evolve over the next few years, it may look completely different than it does now:

• You may offer new products and services
• You may be targeting a new audience
• You may have different business goals
• You may have grown substantially in size and scope

It should come as no surprise that in order to meet the evolving needs of your business over time, your website must be easily scalable. Custom websites provide the scalability you need. There are no limitations on what can be created with custom web design, and this allows you to make any additions or alterations to the functionality of your website that you may need as your business grows.

Template websites, on the other hand, lack the flexibility necessary to make your website scalable over time. You are largely limited by the features provided by the template you choose. While these features may meet your needs now, they may no longer meet your needs in several years. If this occurs, you won’t have the ability to add the new functionality required by the growth of your business.

Advantage: Custom websites

SEO Results

In recent years, it has become increasingly challenging to rank well on search engines. As a result, it’s crucial that your website be constructed using SEO best practices. Custom websites provide much greater ability to achieve the SEO results you need. These websites are built using the latest coding best practices, providing cleaner back-end programming. This will significantly reduce page load times and site speed compared to template websites, which often contain older, bloated coding practices that slow down the website’s performance.

Faster site speed is one of the primary criteria driving Google’s search algorithms and as a result, custom websites will help your SEO performance. In addition, the ability to implement a mobile-friendly responsive design on a custom website will further improve your search rankings compared with template websites.

Custom websites also provide the ability to tailor your navigation architecture to the unique needs of your audience, making it easier for them to find the information they need. This improves user experience, which will boost your SEO rankings.

Advantage: Custom websites

Time to Build

It should come as no surprise that the increased complexity and customization associated with custom websites will require more time to build. Custom web design requires a longer planning phase to ensure your website is built in a way that addresses the specific needs and goals of your business. This planning phase will involve extensive collaboration between your team and your custom web design company, and it includes:

• A detailed discussion of your business goals, marketing goals, and goals for the website development project
• Establishing the relevant KPIs necessary to measure the success of your website over time
• The development of a wireframe (a blueprint of the website architecture) and detailed website mockups (static images displaying the design of the different pages on your website) to ensure alignment between your team and your web design agency.

In addition, the steps involved in building the website – front-end design, back-end development, copywriting, testing, on-page SEO – all take a significant amount of time to complete. If you require specific advanced functionality that creates additional layers of complexity to your website, it will extend the timeline for the buildout process even longer. The good news is that many of these steps can be performed concurrently, which will speed up the process significantly.

Template websites take a lot of this work out of the process. Using a pre-built template significantly reduces the development time. In addition, you’re limited by the color schemes, layouts and other design elements associated with the template, so this eliminates the need for wireframes, mockups and many of the other planning items that go into a custom website. You can simply create new pages and add the content and images you need for each page. As a result, template websites can be built much faster than a custom website.

Keep in mind that faster doesn’t mean better. The additional time for planning, building and testing also helps you achieve better website performance and superior marketing results. If your goal is to maximize the performance of your website (and it should be), then the longer development time for a custom website will pay dividends for years to come. But if you’re in a time crunch and really need to launch a website as fast as possible, a template website will help you complete the project in the least amount of time.

Advantage: Template websites

Cost

Custom websites aren’t cheap. They are very labor intensive and time-consuming to build. The additional custom functionality adds to the complexity of the project as well. For this reason, you’ll need the assistance of a custom web design company that assigns a team of specialists to build the high performing website your business needs. But with additional cost comes improved performance and superior marketing results. Ultimately, this will benefit your business immensely and deliver much better ROI for the life of your website.

Unfortunately, not every company has the financial resources to afford a custom website. If your budget is limited, it may not be practical to enlist the services of a custom web design and development agency. In these situations, a template website may help you stay within your budget. Just keep in mind that the tradeoffs associated with this lower cost – pre-packaged design layouts, limited functionality, poorer SEO performance, etc.

If you can afford the cost of a custom website, this is always the best solution. The benefits you’ll achieve make the additional cost well worth it in the long run. But if you simply can’t afford a custom website, a template solution will allow you to build a web presence while your company continues to grow. As your company experiences greater success and your marketing budget grows, you can then replace your template website with a custom website.

Advantage: Template websites

Webolutions Offers Custom Web Design Services that Help Your Business Thrive

If your primary goal for building a new website is to maximize the ROI on your marketing efforts, there is no substitute for custom web design. A template website is simply unable to match the levels of performance you’ll experience from a custom website. At Webolutions, we can create a custom website that will address your specific goals in order to help your business grow and thrive.

Our unique Websites Right Methodology™ has been developed over nearly three decades, and it leverages the knowledge and experience we’ve gained from building thousands of websites since our inception in 1994. This process provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to custom web design and development which delivers increased marketing performance that will help your business become more successful.

With our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™, you’ll benefit from a truly collaborative process that engages your team at every stage to ensure we are all aligned on achieving your specific goals. This starts with an extensive planning phase which includes:

• Thorough discovery sessions where we develop your website goals, allowing us to design with these goals in mind and measure success over time
• Outlining the home page key elements to define your story, convey your brand messaging, and help your audience more easily navigate to the areas of the website which will provide them with the information they need
• Creating detailed website mockups to ensure you love your design before we begin building your website
• Outlining of all functional requirements to ensure your website provides the optimal user experience your audience desires and drives the conversions you expect

During the website design and development process, our team will perform all custom programming and development required to achieve the advanced functionality you need. When necessary, we will incorporate third-party tools to enhance this functionality. We’ll also work with your team to develop and implement a tactical content strategy that establishes your business as a thought leader, builds trust with your audience and effectively communicates your story. Our proven SEO best practices will be used to provide the best possible search engine rankings.

Prior to launch, we will conduct comprehensive website testing for different browsers and devices to ensure your website works properly and is delivering the desired experience. After launch, we will conduct ongoing analysis to monitor your website’s success, and we’ll provide recommendations as needed for improvements that will drive better results.

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

The post Custom Web Design vs. Template Websites: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.