For new startups and entrepreneurs a professional web design can be very helpful in helping them to establish a brand identity and enable them to explain their value proposition to a large amount of audience. A professional web design for the startups can drive them a lot of website traffic, which automatically increase the chances of sales. A professional web design is more affective in driving online sales and conversions. It can easily project your brand’s value proposition and offer an excellent customer/user experience, which also results in more online sales and conversions. A professional web design and a great user experience is very crucial for small businesses and startups. It will make their website and brand memorable and people will keep coming back to it. The market researches and studies have shown that a website visitor can build an impression of a brand within a fraction of a second, 50 milliseconds to be precise. That brand image or perception is so strong that it can literally influence their decision. That is why it is very important that the first impression you gave to your business website visitors is good and long lasting.
The Dubai and in fact the entire UAE has almost 99% population connected to the internet. Everyone owns a smartphone or a computer. People tend to spend hours on their smartphones and surfing the internet from mobile devices and computers. That is the reason a professional web design contributes a lot in building online brand identity and brand reputation. For a small business or a startup the website could be a game changer. It could provide them easy access to hundreds and thousands of potential buyers and let them promote their products/services easily in the unexplored markets. Before we step into the main topic let us first understand what is a profession web design?
What is a Professional Web Design?
That might sound like a ‘million dollar question’ but it isn’t. If a small business or startup managed to do only a few minor things right, they can have a profession web design which can ensure higher conversion rates, good brand identity and it can also ensure a steady and quick growth. Here are some key features that a small business should consider for their web design in order to make it professional:
- Domain Name: You must be thinking it has nothing to do with the design, but it is very important though. A professional domain name should be simple, easy to remember, and it shouldn’t have any special character or number in it. It is better to have your brand name as the domain name.
- Logo:Small businesses and startups are hesitant to spend much on their logo, but keep it in mind that your logo will be dictating your entire brand identity in the online and offline worlds. It has to be professional.Acquire a professional logo designer to get a great professional logo.
- Header of the Web Design:The header must contain the logo, a menu, social media links, address (if you have enough space), phone number, email and any other contact information.
- Hero Area: The area just below the header is called hero area, it should have multiple sliding images with appropriate taglines and CTA (call to action), chose these images with great care, they have huge impact on your visitors.
- Above the Fold: If you still have space after the image slider, then try to add something which attracts the visitor’s attention. Something that can build trust, such as client testimonials, an attractive tagline or any such thing could be very helpful.
- Below the Fold or Body:Below the fold section of the website must have high quality content with design elements and visuals that enhance readability and project on your value proposition and important taglines. This area should have all important internal links and short details of your products or services. Avoid adding too much content and details.
- Footer Section: This section should have all important links, detailed contact information and address, working hours, any other contact details such as sales’ email or support phone number, etc. You can also add a small contact form here and email newsletter subscription is also a great tool to gather email address which can be used for marketing purposes in future.
- Inner pages:Inner pages should have dedicated design, but that design should also follow the homepage theme. About Page, Contact Page, Product/Services Listing Page, Detail Page, Blog (if any), Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, etc. are the pages that build trust and provide additional information to your visitors and such details are very helpful in improving conversion rate.
- Navigation Structure: The information navigation structure is a key to user experience, a professional web design should offer excellent navigation which enables the user to reach to any content within 2 to 3 clicks. Along with that add quick links in side-panes, sticky widgets, and such prominent places. Breadcrumb is a great technique to improve navigations of the web design.
- Loading Speed: The loading speed is one of the most important factor these days, both the website visitors and the search engine give it a huge consideration. Make sure your web design loads quickly, a web page that takes more than 3 to 5 seconds to load is most likely to lose up-to 80% of its traffic. So a web design should be optimized for speed and the hosting should also have to be good to ensure minimum load time for the web pages.
- Responsive: These days a responsive or mobile friendly web design is a necessity. The mobile searches have already surpassed the regular computer searches. Which makes responsive feature even more important. Make sure you have Hamburger menu in mobiles and the overall design is optimized to be thumb-friendly to ensure good user experience.
- Content and Language: The content and design both are equally important and both has to resonate well to ensure a desired outcome. The content has to be simple, easy-to-understand and it should provide all information which can convince your visitors to convert. For Dubai and other emirates of UAE the English and Arabic are the most popular languages, makes sure you have content for all important and relevant languages on your website.
- Multimedia Content: These days multimedia content is also gaining popularity, people tend to prefer a short video instead of reading a paragraph. Use multimedia content as much as you could, but do not over-do it. Never use background music, unless and until it is absolutely necessary.
- SEO: SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique to make your web design more search engine friendly. It means search engine can easily read and access the content of your web design. This will help them to indexing your pages, and the indexed pages with high quality score will get most of the free web traffic. Free organic web traffic can boost your online sales. In fact a website is considered healthy if it is getting almost 60% to 70% of its web traffic from organic sources.
These are the traits of a professional web design. A professional web design must have all above mentioned features. Once you got a professional web design only then you will be able to unlock the true potential of your business website. A website not only let the startups to promote their brand very quikcly but it also act like a personality in the online world. If your website’s personality is not impressive enough you will not be able to satisfy your online prospects and visitors. Make sure your web design is up-to-the-mark and it has all the necessary features and functionalities.
Read More: How to Get a Cost-Effective Website for a Small Business
Startups can Quickly Get Huge Traffic from their Professional Web Design
The biggest source of the website traffic is the search engines and then comes the social media platforms and any other marketing channel. There are so many different ways to promote your website, once it is popular it can remain popular for a long period. A professional web design is always built in a way that it do better in the searches and social media. A startup or small business can start promoting their website from their physical store or office. They can link their website with their social media profiles and pages which can further help diverting traffic to the website. Social media platform integration is also a good tool to let your visitors easily share your web pages and content on their social media which also divert a lot of free traffic to the website.
Although for small businesses and startups the marketing budget is not too high but businesses can also utilize paid digital marketing channel to bring quick traffic to their professional website. Here are some popular traffic source and how startups and small businesses can use them to drive traffic and to increase online conversions:
Organic Website Traffic and Web Design
Organic traffic is a great source of online leads and conversions. The organic traffic comes from the search engines such as Google. The Google have almost 96% of search market share in the UAE. The other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo also follow the same criteria and set of rules to rank a website. The websites which rank higher in the search engine get most of the traffic. The search engines such as Google scan all websites in the internet and identify the subject of a webpage and then rank it as per its quality and relevance and some technical indicators. A web design plays an extremely important role in a website’s search engine rankings. If a web design is SEO friendly, it let the search engine easily read it’s all content. Moreover the search engine also consider different style and types of fonts as well, if a web page have a good amount of content with appropriate headings and highlights, it will get better ranking.
There are so many other different factors that can contribute to a web page’s ranking and most of them are associated with the web design. A good web design have capability to link similar pages as well. These internal links, source code, meta tags, structured data, schema, and heading tags, etc. are all part of on-page SEO strategy which is majorly based on the web design. Whenever someone searches for a particular product or service, if you are offering the same and have a good quality SEO friendly web page dedicated to that topic, the chances are you will get found by users and you will get traffic. That is why search engine optimization and SEO friendly web designs are tend to perform well for the businesses.
Social Media and Web Design
The social media are completely different from search engine but they can also drive a good amount of free traffic for a startup website, this traffic is also known as referral traffic. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE people tend to spend hours on their social media on daily bases. This makes them more important. Now there are different methods to drive free website traffic from social media. The first and most important thing is to link all your available social media pages and profiles with your website. Another most important thing is to integrate the social media platforms. That integration can be done by inserting special source codes in your web design which allow your website visitors to be able to share your web pages on social media.
Once your website and web pages are shared on social media they start appearing in people’s profiles. Especially the one who is sharing your web page will also share it with their followers and fans. This is how a web page keep on getting shared over and over again, and people start clicking on the post to reach to the website. There are certain methods and techniques that are used to make a link appear more attractive on the social media which further increase the click rate and bring more traffic. These all programing and source codes are done on the web design level. If a web design is not compatible with those features, a business will lose a huge amount of potential customers and prospects.
Web Design Is Crucial for Paid Digital Marketing Campaigns
Usually a startup or small business have limited marketing budget, so it is very important that if you are running any paid digital marketing campaign your web design is also capable of converting leads. Because from the paid marketing campaigns whether it is paid search ads, display ads, video ads, Facebook/Instagram ads, or CPC or PPC on any other social media or digital channel, ultimately the will bring visitors to your website. If a web design is not equipped with all important features that can convert a visitor into a lead or conversion you will end up losing money and time. The most popular search ads are Google search ads, these ads have highest conversion rate but are also the most expensive ones. If someone is searching for a product or service that you are offering it means that they are already interested in purchasing, so such users require very clear information about the product and service, hence should be directed to the dedicated product/service page.
Similarly for YouTube and Display Ads, the users will eventually end up on your website, so your web design must offer a great user journey to let these visitors convert easily with convenience. For social media paid marketing campaigns as well, eventually most of the campaigns divert the interested users to the business website, then it is up to the web design. So a startup or small business must have a professional web design in order to take full benefits of their paid digital marketing campaigns as well.
A Professional Web Design Promotes Positive Brand Image
For any business small or big, startup or already established making a good first impression is extremely important. The first impression is what have the most influence on the customers and visitors and it is very difficult to change that. For websites, the human psychology is also involves, the human brain works in very peculiar ways, although it may sound uncanny but a human brain takes only around 50 milliseconds to build an impression of a brand in their subconscious mind when the look at the website. So web design plays a very important role in building your brand’s first impression. Once an impression is made, whether good or bad, it requires a lot of efforts to change it. In case of websites the content and web design both are important, the content itself is nothing without a professional web design and a web design is nothing without a well-prepared content.
If your website visitors got a positive impression most likely they will perceive a positive brand image from their interaction and vice versa. Is very rare cases, if a brand failed to build a good first impression can change the customer’s mindset during their interaction. So, it is important to have a professional web design which imprints a good first impression and then the web design can also amp up the effects of your content on the visitor and compel them to convert. A positive brand image also have other benefits, it helps in customer retention and also increase customer loyalty.
Read More: 5 Signs You need a New Web Design for Your Business Website
A Professional Web Design Increase Customer Loyalty
The customer loyalty is entirely based on the quality of products/services you offer and their experience while interacting with your brand. The customer experience and customer journey is crucial for improving customer satisfaction. The customer loyalty very much depends upon customer satisfaction. A professional web design for a startup or a small business can be used as a great tool to boost customer satisfaction and to enhance their experience which lead to higher customer loyalty. A professional web design not only offer a captivating web design, graphics, visuals, and information but it has to offer a unique and very convenient customer experience. That is something which is completely different with different businesses, the important thing is to understand what your customers are seeking and what they are expecting from your website.
A professional web design will enable to you meet your customer’s expectations. The purpose of a website is to offer all what is needed for a prospect to convert. It should include all the information, features and additional elements that clearly present your value proposition. That is why a professional web design is more capable of delivering a satisfactory customer experience. Once a customer is satisfied they will tend to be more loyal to the brand. Loyal customers are also good brand advocate and help promoting a positive brand image. It is nine to twelve time less costly to sell to an existing customer than acquiring a new customer. That is why customer loyalty is also very important and loyal customers are a precious brand asset at which a brand can set a foundation for long-term growth and progress.
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A Professional Web Design is a Great Competitive Advantage
A professional web design enables the startups and small businesses to easily compete with large businesses and big brands. In the digital and online world no one can see your actual size, all people can see is your website and what you are offering through it and what image your website is portraying on the visitors’ mind will become your brand identity. Small businesses and startups always have limited resources, it is very hard for them to compete with big brands and large enterprises. However, with a professional web design a startup or small business can easily establish a trustworthy brand identity which will increase conversions and online leads. A professional web design also boost brand recognition. Which is extremely important. For example whenever you see the KFC logo you can easily recognize it, whenever you see a Coca-Cola cane you can easily identify the business. This is brand recognition, and a professional web design is very capable of boosting your brand recognition.A well-recognized brand identity is a key to long term success.
A professional web design is also good in search engine and with social media channels. Which is also another great competitive advantage. It enables the startups and small businesses to easily reach to the unexplored markets and territories. Obviously for a small business or a new startup the resources are limited and rapid expansion is also very difficult, however a professional web design can take the brand to the markets where physical expansion is not possible. It gives a business more exposure and higher visibility. In short a professional web design offers a variety of competitive advantages which ensures quick growth and long term success.
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Conclusion
Startups and small businesses are always eager to grow quickly. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the internet is widely used, almost 99% of the population is connected to the internet. People tend to spend hours on social media on daily bases. This makes internet even more important. A professional web design can portray a very positive brand image for the startups and small businesses. In this blog we have mentioned all important traits of a professional web design. A professional web design is in-line with the search engine standards and also offer social media integrations. Which provide startups a chance to quickly access to multiple markets and reach to virtually any audience they want. This provides a quick boost to the sales and conversions which generates revenue and ensure higher profitability hence startups and small businesses can quickly grow if they utilize their professional web design strategically. RSI Concepts is a leading professional web design Dubai agency, if you need a brand new website or seeking to revamp your existing website, feel free to reach us out. We also offer complete digital marketing, brand awareness and online lead generation services as well. You can contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment section below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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