Quite a few of us have resolved to hit the ground running, business-wise, this New Year. One of the best ways you can start the year off right is to get a fresh new look for your website, or new promotional material overall!
Are you working to improve your brand image, or appeal to a broader market? Are you launching a new product or service, and need to get the word out in a big way? Maybe you’ve decided to finally start the revolutionary new business you’ve been dreaming of, and want to do it right?
The Little Design Studio is ready to help you achieve these goals, and many more! We’re easy to hire, and even easier to work with. Just ring 01832 275306 or email us at hello@thelittledesignstudio.co.uk. We’d love to discuss your needs, goals and budget, and see what we can do for you and your business.
But… I already have a website.
Of course you do. It’s 2015. Everyone has a website – and that’s sort of the problem. In 1992, all it took to be on the cutting edge of information technology was to ‘have a website’. It didn’t have to be amazing – just look at what Amazon looked like in 1995, and they’ve done ok.
But that was 20 years ago. Today, you need a lot more to generate any digital sales, and that’s where the action is. Around 2/3 of purchasing decisions start with the results of a web search today, even if some of the money actually changes hands in a brick-and-mortar store at the end. This means that if your website isn’t stunning, you’re leaving six out of ten sales on the table. No one can afford to do that, especially these days. You need to have a visually compelling, user-friendly and SEO-oriented website, populated with rich and engaging content.
Ok… but how exactly do I do that?
Even if I could answer that simply and accurately for every business, I’d be a fool to do it for free. The fact is, each business is different. Each does something unique for their own set of customers, and each needs something different from their website to really thrive. Here are a few examples of big factors in online engagement, and ways the Little Design Studio has been able to make them work for our clients.
1. Responsiveness, all the way
Not only are we online more than ever, we use more separate devices to get there than ever. Many of your clients have a desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone, and might use any of them to search for what they need depending or where they are, or which device is closer to hand. That means that your web presence has to be just as strong and easy to access for someone on a Galaxy running Android as it is for someone else scrolling through results on their iPad.
You have to appear on the first page of Google, to be sure, but what if they’re searching on Facebook? How is your social media presence these days, anyway? A good website is the centre that links your social, online and physical presences, and gets your core message out across all important channels.
One of The Little Design Studio’s successes in this regard was in developing a fully responsive website for Alternatives, Stamford’s Pregnancy Advice Centre.
We completely redesigned their website, starting with the careful selection of colours, design elements and imagery that visitors could connect to on a deep, emotional level. The main goal of the website was not sales, but to let people who need help know that it is available and easy to get.
Because so many of their clients are in a vulnerable position, they could not be relied upon to search diligently for help or advice. We had to reach out to them, no matter what method they chose to reach out on. Responsive web design was the key to achieving that.
Take a look at the result below.
2. New, vibrant and engaging web design
The online face of your business is more and more becoming the first way potential customers will see you. This means that it is no longer an afterthought, but the core of your branding! Is your current website up to the job of providing the first, and perhaps only, impression your business will make on potential customers?
Take Simpson and Partners Estate Agents as an example. Before contacting us, their website was struggling to generate any business for them.
When The Little Design Studio was called in, we quickly identified the problem areas of their website, and sat down with them to determine how we could give them a site that would give them the complete user experience they needed, and make sure that visitors found both the potential homes they were looking for and a market-savvy, reputable company to sell their existing home.
Take a look below at before and after, an engaging and responsive site that now conveys their brand powerfully to visitors on desktops, tablets and smartphones equally well.
If you worry that your website design may not be as effective as it once was, or says all the wrong things about your brand and your company, the Little Design Studio can help you too! Give us a call, and let us inject new life and enthusiasm into it! Don’t know where to start? No problem. We’re full of fresh new ideas, and we love a challenge.
3. Clear purpose leads to clear results
Before committing to a redesign, you and your web designer absolutely must have a clear idea about what you need the website to actually do!
A great deal of visitors to your site will only look for a few seconds before moving on. If you haven’t managed to clearly spell out what you’re about in that time, they’ll move on without ever getting any part of your message. That certainly won’t do you any good!
Direction and objective are both vitally important, and you need to be able to explain both to your designer in order to get what you want from the design process. To get an idea of how to do that, take a look at our guide to briefing a website designer.
Good web design begins and ends with close collaboration between designer and client. The full process includes, at a minimum:
For an example of what this process can achieve, look at Little Stitches.
We initially designed the Little Stitches website as a portfolio to showcase Liz’s beautifully hand-crafted gifts. The original website focused on telling the visitors about Liz and her passion for her creations, and displaying a portfolio of her work. It then pointed visitors to various social media platforms where Little Stitches already had a huge following.
Just a few years later Little Stitches’ focus changed, and we once again had the pleasure of working with Liz to create a new look for her ever expanding business and to develop a new responsive website that incorporated a full-featured on-line shop. Take a look at what she has now!
4. Your business has grown and evolved, and your website needs to grow with it.
Your website should be an integral part of your business. If it does not change as you do it will stop driving you forward, and start holding you back.
Furthermore, your website has to comply with all the latest trends and technological advancements. You can’t really ‘futureproof’ your online presence, and that means that you need to regularly invest time and resources in managing, updating, improving and fine-tuning your website for better functionality.
Essence Events provides event management, marketing and promotion, sales and hospitality services. Over the years their business had grown, and they felt that their website needed a more professional and corporate look. See below.
5. One last note – Performance and Speed
Not only does your website need to have a good look and a highly functional design, you also have to ensure that it doesn’t take forever to load, especially on low-bandwidth mobile platforms!. A great many visitors will cancel a page if it hangs, and more will start off cross with you if your page loads in fits and starts, elements moving across the screen as they come in.
A fast load time is one of the most crucial factors to ensure early in the design process. Make sure you don’t end up with an all-singing, all-dancing monster that looks amazing on a broadband desktop, but takes five minutes (if it loads at all) on a tablet over a coffee shop’s throttled Wi-Fi.
Of course, the real key to getting a top quality website is working with a skilled designer. Why not give the Little Design Studio a call?
