5 Critical Things to Consider When Choosing a Website Design Company

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Once you’ve made the important decision to create (or update) your business’s online presence, another weighty choice is waiting in the wings:

Who are you going to task with this crucial project?

There’s certainly no shortage of options these days. An abundance of choice, however, doesn’t make the decision any easier. Should you opt for a do-it-yourself template that’s cheap on the front end but will cost you down the line? Or, should you call on a slick global firm whose cadre of services is more expansive—and expensive—than you could ever possibly need? For small to medium-sized businesses, the answer is usually somewhere in between.

In your search for the “Goldilocks zone” of website design, a local boutique agency is often the perfect solution. Unlike larger firms hawking mass-produced, cookie-cutter solutions or overly complicated and overly priced services, boutique agencies offer the flexibility to customise a website design solution for your business’s unique demands. The smaller client base of boutique agencies means that you’ll usually enjoy the advantages of direct owner involvement. And sourcing local talent means that help is always just right around the corner.

Boutique or big brand, local or global, there are 5 critical things you should consider when choosing a website design company.

1. What exactly are you paying for?

When it comes to website design, the old maxim “you get what you pay for” couldn’t be truer. If a solution for your business’s online presence seems too good to be true, it probably is. Find out what’s included in your web design company’s proposed fee. Do their deliverables end at a shiny new website, or is ongoing support built-in to the price? Does the site come equipped with a digital marketing strategy in place, or is it destined to languish in obscurity with no real chance of being discovered on search engines? Another important question to ask brings us to number 2 on the list…

2. Will you be expected to manage the content on your own?

Inexpensive templates with do-it-yourself content management systems (CMS) can seem like the ideal route for a budget conscious business looking for a polished site. That is until you realize that the real work of content integration is left to you. Few small to mid-sized business owners have the time or energy to run their business and play the roles of website manager and IT support. Opting for a design company that offers a finished website, complete with dynamic content, as well as ongoing support as your business grows, is an investment that will save you a whole lot of time, money, and headaches in the long run.

3. Will you have round-the-clock support?

For many of your customers, your website and your business are one in the same. You can’t afford to have your site go down—even at 3 in the morning. It’s important to keep this in mind when choosing a website design company. Will their support team be there when you need them, or will you be expected to troubleshoot bugs on your own? Can you get a real live human on the phone to talk them through the nuances of your issue, or are you expected to type questions into an instant messenger field and hope for a response? By hiring a website design company that’s committed to managing your site for you—24 hours a day, 365 days a year—you take the need for customer support out of the question.

4. What sort of creative chops does the design team have?

As a direct reflection of your business, your website should be sleek, stylish, and functional. It should be designed with the user in mind, with intuitive information architecture and effortless navigation. Designing a simple yet striking site is no easy task. It takes years of experience and cutting-edge coding know-how. The best way to know if a design team is up to the task of creating your business’s online presence is to learn how much experience they have under their belt, and what their portfolio looks includes.

5. Is the agency local Australian?

Choosing a locally owned and operated Australian web design company offers heaps of advantages. Your site is sure to perform better on locally based servers, giving your customers a quick, seamless online experience. You’ll have a support team right around the corner, providing the peace of mind that comes from working with your neighbours. And you’ll sleep just a little bit better at night knowing that you’re contributing to the strength of the Australian economy by keeping locals employed.

Choosing a website design company is one of the most important business decisions you’ll make. It can mean the difference between hours of aggravating troubleshooting and a professional site that all but runs itself. Keeping in mind these 5 critical factors will go a long way in making sure you make the right decision—both for today and for you business’s long-term future.

8 Ingredients Every Great Website Should Have

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There are good websites, and then there are great websites. There are sites that get the job done, and then there are sites that make you pause for a moment and whisper, simply, “cool.” As the digital ambassador of your business, it’s best if your website falls into the latter category. But what is it, exactly, that separates a great website from a merely good one? Here are 8 ingredients that make the difference.

1. Eye-catching first impression

An average visitor will spend less than 10 seconds on any given website. That’s 10 seconds you’ve got to make an impression on a potential customer, and get him or her to engage. Your website should be designed with this in mind. It should offer a clean, vibrant snapshot of who you are as a company and the unique value proposition you provide as a brand.

2. Clean, uncomplicated design

Design and layout shape user experience. Uncomplicated design and efficient layout are much easier for our brains to process, making for a comfortable user experience. And the more comfortable a user is, the more likely he or she is to engage with your site. The best designers know how to use empty space to their advantage, and don’t rely on unnecessary bells and whistles.

3. Clear and intuitive information architecture

When a user comes to your website, he or she is looking to solve a problem. The route to their solution should be obvious. Intuitive information architecture arranges pages in a logical hierarchy—a sensible road map from one end of the site to the other. Each page within the hierarchy is designed with user experience as its top priority. The easier a site is for users to navigate, the more likely they are to find what they’re looking for.

4. Unique and compelling content

Crisp design and an intuitive framework are only half the battle, of course. Even the most aesthetically stunning site is nothing without strong content in the form of first-rate copywriting. One of the best ways to differentiate yourself from the competition is with a unique and compelling brand voice. The information presented on your website should be relevant, useful, and engaging. Good copy is fun to read, tells a story, and reveals a distinctive brand personality.

5. Robust and reliable backend

Behind the scenes is where the functionality of your website is put to the test. Whether your site is a fully functioning e-commerce platform or a one-page description of services, it should be developed to load quickly without bugs or quirks. Customers should feel assured that any sensitive information they provide is protected by top-notch security measures. And it’s critical that you have a support team at the ready in the event that any significant backend problems emerge.

 6. SEO and digital marketing strategy

This is something we hit on a lot around here, but it really can’t be said enough. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or inspiring your website is if nobody can find it. These days digital marketing isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. Without search engine optimization, your site might as well live locally on your developer’s desktop. When seeking out an agency to bring your business to life online, make sure they offer comprehensive SEO and other digital marketing solutions.

7. Mobile responsiveness

It’s official. In 2015, the majority of digital media consumption now takes place on mobile devices. That means that more than half of your customers are accessing your website on their phones, tablets or other devices. Mobile responsiveness is essential to your site’s success. It’s not enough for your site to look the same on a smaller screens. It has to perform the same as well. Customers expect a seamless online experience, regardless of which device they’re using.

8. A reliable team who knows your company

At the end of the day, a website is only as good as the people behind it. Having a dedicated web design team on hand to manage site maintenance and ensure round-the-clock optimization is indispensible. What’s more, working with an agency who knows your company inside and out, and who can provide everything from logo design to social media management will ensure a cohesive brand experience for your customer base, online and off.

What Makes a Great Logo? 4 Essential Elements of Brand Identity

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Your logo is no small thing. A good logo becomes synonymous with your brand. It captures the essence of what you stand for and what makes you unique. A good logo works its way into the memories of your customers, without pushing its way in. It’s unforgettable yet unpretentious. Golden arches, the silhouette of a bitten apple, a red-and-white bull’s-eye—not only can we easily name the brands behind these iconic logos, we can describe their products, personalities, and key differentiators. Your logo is nothing short of the heart of your brand’s identity.

So, what makes a great logo? Whether you’re just getting started or in the midst of repositioning an existing brand, there are a few elements that every powerful brand identity includes.

Know Yourself                                                                                   

In order to create an identity to which your audience relates, you first have to know who you are. As mentioned, the best logos capture the essence of what a brand stands for and what makes it unique. So it stands to reason that you should have these fundamental truths figured out before you sit down to craft your identity. Start with the basics. What are your brand’s purpose, vision, mission, and values? For what reason does it exist, beyond making a profit? From there you can define your brand’s personality, its behaviours and characteristics. Each of these core tenets and distinctive attributes will help to inform the design of your brand’s identity.

Know Your Audience

Once you have a thorough grasp on who your brand is at the deepest level, it’s time to turn your attention outward. Just as important as understanding yourself is understanding those to whom you’re communicating. Insight into your target audience segments enables you to craft an identity to which they’ll relate. So, what are the demographics and psychographics of your target audience(s)? What are their needs and wants? What motivates them? What style or aesthetic do they most readily identify with? Answering these questions will go a long way toward determining how to shape your identity so that your customers will not only notice it, but be moved by it.

Work With an Experienced, Creative Design Team

A successful logo isn’t realised on the back of a napkin. It’s a complex, nuanced process of trial and error involving colour, imagery, symbolism, typography, and layout. While you may not need to invest the staggering amounts of money that someone like McDonald’s or Apple does on logo design, it’s important that you work with a team who knows what they’re doing. At this point, you know who you are and to whom you’re speaking, but only a team with proven experience developing creative solutions to visual messaging will be able to translate your vision into an effective identity. Good designers approach the challenge from many different angles, offering you ideas you may not have thought of. Plus, an expert third-party is the only way to remove bias from the design process and ensure a maximally effective logo. One thing to keep in mind is that whichever design team designs your logo will come away from the process with an intimate familiarity with your brand and audience. Working with the same team on initiatives like website design and digital marketing ensures cohesive identity across channels.

Be Consistent

The final element that goes into crafting a great logo is also among the most important. A brand’s identity is only effective if it is consistently implemented across channels. One of the most powerful effects of a good logo is recognisability. You want your audience to have an immediate and unconscious association whenever they see your logo. But a logo is only recognisable if it is expressed in the same fashion, every time, regardless of medium. There will often be different versions of a brand’s logo—one colour, two colour, four colour, black and white, reverse—but guidelines should be in place for when and where it is appropriate to use each version. Consistency ensures you’re getting the most out of your meticulously designed brand identity.

What Can SEO & PPC Do for You?

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When it comes to digital marketing, the best strategy is to go to the source. And when you consider that 60 to 70 percent of your website’s traffic will come from search engines, targeting this wellspring of potential customers is a no-brainer.

Search engine marketing (SEM) falls into two basic categories, organic and paid. The goal of each of these strategies is the same: a high ranking within the results for keyword searches relevant to your products or services. Organic SEM, commonly known as search engine optimisation (SEO), is all about fine-tuning your website’s content so that it caters to search engine algorithms. Paid SEM, also called pay-per-click (PPC), is where you pay for advertised rankings connected to your optimal keywords.

A sound digital marketing campaign is founded on a strategic combination of SEO and PPC, based on your industry, competition, and marketing budget. What can these invaluable acronyms do for your website? Let’s take a look.

Website visibility

The reality is simple: internet usage is driven by search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask—we’re dependent on sites like these to find what we’re looking for online. And we’ve gotten complacent. Rarely do we click past the first page of results when searching for online content. If a site doesn’t appear on the first page of a search return these days, it may as well not appear at all. SEO and PPC ensure that your website is a fixture amongst this valuable real estate. The more robust your campaign, the higher your ranking. And the higher your ranking, the more visible your website.

A credible online presence

There’s no better way to establish legitimacy and authority in your industry than with first-page search rankings. Outranking the competition on organic search results is the best way to increase traffic to your website. A solid foothold in organic search results can take a while to establish, though. For startups and smaller business just getting into the SEM game, PPC is a great way to ensure that your business appears at the top of relevant search returns.

Qualified leads from targeted marketing

Among the greatest advantages of digital marketing is efficiency. Traditional marketing strategies are the equivalent of sending your message into the ether and hoping it finds the eyes and ears of potential customers. SEO allows you to target qualified leads—those individuals who are already searching for your unique products or services. PPC enables even more precise targeting, putting you in front of users who aren’t just doing research, but are ready to buy. The more accurate your targeted marketing, the more efficient your marketing spend. And the more efficient your marketing spend, the higher your ROI.

Exposure to mobile users

Desktop PCs are slowly but surely going the way of the dodo. The future of the internet is mobile. Search engines like Google have already realised this, and their algorithms now give preference to websites that are optimised for mobile devices. Beyond the convenience of wireless access, mobile search connects users with local resources like never before. Customers are increasingly searching for nearby solutions to their purchasing needs when on the go. And local search results result in higher sales conversions. SEO connects you to the user who is in your neighbourhood and looking for your products or services. And PPC has been shown to be exceedingly more effective on mobile devices.

Right now, someone out there is in need of what your business offers. If they haven’t already, they’ll soon be typing that need into a search engine. The question is: will your website end up on the front page of their results? If not, you’re missing out on revenue. Multiply this by the millions of users around the world in search of the same thing, and you can see why SEO and PPC are indispensible to your digital marketing strategy.

Why Graphic Design is Essential to Your Marketing Efforts—Online and Off

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Every business, no matter how large or small, is a brand. And brands express themselves in a multitude of ways. On the one hand you have verbal expression—the words that comprise your message and the voice in which it’s conveyed. And on the other hand you have visual—the colours, images, symbols, typography, and layout that make up your brand identity.

Each of these facets—the verbal and the visual—plays a central role in shaping the story your brand tells to the world. Just as the verbal constructs a compelling narrative that reveals your brand’s personality, so does the visual create an aesthetic framework inspired by your brand’s defining characteristics. Graphic design is the creation of the visual language of your brand.

Good graphic design enables you to convey your message in nonverbal ways that are remarkable and memorable. It allows for the all-important element of consistency throughout the various touchpoints via which your brand is expressed. While we are every day moving toward an all-digital world, the fact is a large part of marketing still takes place offline. A good designer ensures that your identity is consistent both online and off.

Online

The online world has brought a new dimension to graphic design and brand expression. No longer is design a one-sided experience, a projected message from object to subject. Intrinsic to the digital realm is the element of interaction, a dialectic exchange between the user and the medium. The best designers understand this fact, and use it as the starting point for everything they create. They take advantage of the dynamic nature of digital, and infuse your brand identity with impetus. A cohesive approach to graphic design should extend across your online efforts, including:

Offline

We might be hurtling inexorably towards a digital-only world, but until the day our minds are uploaded to the matrix, we’ll always have one foot in the physical universe. As it relates to marketing, that means print production is alive and well. No business exists entirely online. And the skills it takes to design for physical print collateral are not the same it takes to build a cool website. When possible, it’s best to work with a graphic designer who can handle your offline identity as well as your online presence. There’s no shortage of ways in which traditional marketing can work for you:

  • Business Cards
  • Brochures
  • Stationary
  • Marketing collateral
  • Signage
  • Expo Displays

From the internet to the tradeshow floor, there are countless touchpoints where your brand meets the world. At each of these instances, it’s important that your business is represented in a way that makes people sit up and take notice. Working with a graphic designer to help craft a brand identity that is as remarkable as it is unique is an invaluable investment.

Copywriting: The Power of Compelling Content

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Ask any copywriter and they’ll be happy to tell you: “content is king.” Sure, such an assessment might be the product of professional bias, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth behind it. Content is, at the very least, critical. It plays a central role in all of your marketing efforts—both digital and traditional. Compelling copy can mean the difference between a bored, unengaged user and a converted customer.

Good copywriting works synergistically with design to convey your message with maximum efficacy. It exists across channels like social media, email marketing, and SEM, leveraging each as components of a larger, cohesive narrative. Copywriting tells the story of your brand, connecting your audience with your brand purpose through the most articulate means of communication: words.

Powerful copywriting is nuanced. There’s no paint-by-numbers formula to telling a great brand story. There are, however, three primary features that all compelling content should include.

Distinctive Voice and Tone

At the most immediate level, your copywriting should reflect your unique brand personality. The voice of your content is the individualised style in which it’s conveyed. Is your brand youthful and exuberant or sophisticated and intelligent? The answer should be readily apparent in the voice that conveys its message. The tone of your copy is a more emotional attribute and is defined largely by your target audience. What tone works best to connect with those you’re trying to reach? Humorous and irreverent or professional and business-like? The goal is to decide where on the spectrum is most appropriate. You want your copy to stand out and be remembered, but there are risks involved with being too unconventional.

Conveyance of Value Propositions

If voice and tone are the form of your content, then value propositions are its substance. The objective of any piece of brand messaging—from website content to sales proposals—is to convey the beneficial offerings that only your business can provide. Whether its superior product quality or peerless service, customers should come away understanding precisely what it is that differentiates you from your competition. 

Brand Story through Narrative

As humans we’re hardwired to appreciate narrative. We’ve been telling stories since time immemorial. From the time we painted the walls of caves to depict the drama of hunts and battles, the narrative arc has enthralled us. It stands to reason, then, that marketing messaging is most effective when it takes the form of a compelling story. There are many elements to a great story, but the two that are most essential are character and conflict. When it comes to your brand story, the character is your customer and the conflict is a unique challenge or need that only your service or product can resolve. When your customer is an integral part of your brand story, they can’t help but become invested in its outcome.

Compelling content is often the final piece of the puzzle when it comes to a large marketing initiative like a website redesign. The words that will carry your message are easy to take for granted. But copywriting is just as important an investment as development and design. Even the snazziest of websites, after all, is useless without messaging that compels its users to act. In this sense, the copywriters of the world have it right: content is, in fact, king.