Website design does not only refer to the font, images and style you choose for your website but also, the usability, navigation and page speed. These are only some of the important elements that sit under the umbrella of Ecommerce Website Design. Many businesses do not bother putting any effort or invest in a good web design, creating it generic and weak, claiming it as “unnecessary”. This is far from the truth. Website Design is an important key feature of your business, your online presence and is a massive on-page seo ranking factor. We have come up with 4 of the many important reasons as to why investing in website design is extremely important for the sake of your business. First impressions are everything When a consumer first clicks on your website, it only takes a visitor seconds to form an impression of your brand and they have high expectations. They will judge your business from presentation and layout to information and accessibility, which are all important key features to a successful site. If consumers visit your site and are met with generic, outdated and unappealing content, that will cause your website to perform negativity. Web design impacts how your audience perceives your brand and whether they can trust your business to provide them with the products or services they are searching for. A good web design helps keep traffic and leads on your page and can motivate that call to action through creative content. It is important for your website design to be customer orientated from the very start of the home page to give your brand a good reputation with your potential customers. 75% of users make judgments about a company’s credibility based on visual design alone, so making the visual content, creative and customer orientated could be the make or break for your brand’s impression and reputation with your consumers. It aids your SEO strategy Ecommerce Website Design elements are not only measured and judged by consumers but search engines as well. Search engines will monitor the content, layout and structure of your website and will make a decision on whether your website is good enough to receive a better ranking than other websites. This then negatively impacts your SEO strategy and organic performance. Without a positively performing SEO strategy, your ecommerce business will be struggling to compete for any traffic in your industry and can be detrimental to the business you built. So, your website has to not only pass the user-friendly test as well as the SEO-friendly test in order to be an optimal site with good rankings and traffic flow. Without taking these into consideration, your ranks will decline and when your ranks go down, your competitors’ rankings go up, which brings us to our next point. You’ve got competition The online world is competitive and no matter what sort of business or services you provide, you’ve got competition. To survive in your industry, you need to stand out and be on top of your competitors. Your competitors may have caught on to the fact that web design is a significant strategy to increase positive performance on their website and taken advantage of this. In order to stay one step ahead of the competition, you need uniqueness to stand out, monitoring your competitors and having a website design that contains beneficials elements that your competitors don’t, presented in a unique, user-friendly way is a step in the right direction. It is important to monitor what sort of strategies your competitors are currently using, this helps you identify what your business may need to invest in, in terms of Website design and SEO strategies. Friends close, competitors closer! Consistency is key Having a consistent, user-friendly website design, gives your business a better reputation. When building leads or opportunities for potential sales, you want your customers to recognise your brand and get familiar with who you are to generate brand awareness. By using consistent on-page SEO, formatting, fonts and overall design, you’re creating a brand profile for your consumers to form connections with. By building consistency in a professional manner, you’re building your business’s reputation as a trustworthy, reliable website. That way consumers can recall your brand with a positive user experience which then benefits your website. Design chaos or genericness can cause your brand to be unidentifiable to customers, decreasing your rankings and potential traffic to your site. Your website can make a significant difference between your businesses success and failure. If you’ve noticed your website design is not up to scratch, or your SEO rankings are not performing to your expectations, reach out to us at our local SEO agency, DGreat Solutions and let us know your concerns. Our professional SEO and website design specialists are qualified and can guarantee a better success rate to optimise your website. Give us a call on 1300 955 184 or fill in our free, no obligation quote form.
Website localisation is a proven method for increasing sales revenue from local customers in both the B2C and B2B space. Regardless of whether your company targets only local customers, or a combination of both local customers and national customers, you are probably leaving money on the table in the form of lost sales revenue, if you don’t invest in designing a localised website. If you are looking at website design Melbourne based companies will face common challenges with website design Sydney firms also face. But there are also some differences that will be unique to each area. What is Website Localisation? Website localisation is a term that covers two distinctly separate concepts. These are design localisation and content localisation. These can be defined thus: Design localisation – here we are talking about the actual look and feel of the website. Localised websites are physically designed to connect with local customers. When a local customer visits a localised website, they will instantly relate to the colors, graphics and overall theme of the site. Content localisation – here we are talking about the actual words, images and other types of content such as video that has been published on the site. This content is developed to leverage the value of localised keywords. This results in search engines such as Google returning the site higher in search results for local searches. By combining these two concepts as part of a web development project, a company opens the door to the potential for increased local site traffic, and thus increased local revenue and better conversion. Localised Website Design Melbourne Considerations When considering website design Melbourne companies face a challenging situation. On the one hand, Melbourne, as the Capital City of Australia, is a targeted rich environment when it comes to seeking local customers. However, this makes it incredibly difficult to actually design a site that will be visually appealing, and connect with the entire population of Melbourne. We can leverage certain design ideas such as incorporating well-known Melbourne landmarks as part of the graphical content of the site, such as Melbourne Cricket Ground and Melbourne City Center. However, even though these sites may be instantly recognizable to many Melbourne residents, they may not necessarily connect with everyone. The large population of Melbourne is diverse and made up of many sub-communities. Content wise, creating localised site content for Melbourne is relatively easy. Almost every type of company will be able to find news, information, and events taking place in Melbourne that fit with their products and services. This makes coming up with localised content themes for use in content marketing campaigns very easy. Localised Website Design Sydney Considerations Creating a website design for Sydney companies can be used to develop a better local image is a little simpler form than Melbourne. The Sydney skyline is one of the most instantly identifiable in the world. Additionally, Sydney Harbor is central to life in Sydney, it sets the entire vibe for the city. Therefore, creating a website theme and design which connects with local Sydney residents is simpler to achieve than it is in Melbourne. Put simply, Sydney has a much more easily defined identity than Melbourne. An identity that most residents already connect with. We just need to design a local website to incorporate this identity. Once again, creating localised content for a website designed for Sydney firms that are aimed at driving local traffic is also quite simple. As with any large city, there will be plenty of events and news occurring that almost any company will be able to find a common theme with some of them, to use as part of their ongoing content marketing efforts. Localised Website Design. Melbourne versus Sydney. Final Thoughts Even though website localisation has proven to be an effective way to attract more local customers, it can also have a detrimental effect for companies that also sell nationally or internationally. In these cases, it is often considered best practice to develop separate web pages. Some that target only local customers, and some that are suitable for a much wider national or international market. By designing and developing a website in this fashion, it gains the benefits of being optimized for the local market, but not at the exclusion of attracting visitors and potential customers from much further afield. In effect, giving the best of both worlds, with no limits or restrictions at all. DGreat Solutions has been developing fully localised website designs for the Sydney and Melbourne areas since 2014. We have the skills needed to tackle any web development project. Our team has the internal skills that ensure that every project we tackle, results in exceptional results every time.
For companies that primarily serve customers in their local community, it is important that their website design appeals to people within those communities. If we consider both Perth and Adelaide, we know that these two cities are very different. They look different, they have a different vibe, and they have unique communities. So, to put things simply, when it comes to website design Perth needs a different approach than Adelaide if you intend to attract predominantly local customers. The Importance of Localisation As mentioned above, the design, look, and feel of a website designed to sell into a local community needs to be fitting. However, there are more reasons why developing a localised website is important. One of the main reasons we develop a localised site, and more importantly, populated it with localised content, is to attract more local visitors. Consider for a moment that search engines such as Google always try and match people with the best results for their search query. They also collect lots of data from their users, including their location. So, when somebody in a part of Australia such as Perth or Adelaide, searches for let’s say a website design Adelaide or website design Perth, Google will try and return local companies highest in search results. By making sure your website fits local search criteria, you can attract more visitors, and hopefully turn more visitors into paying customers. Designing a Website Specifically for Perth Australia When it comes to website design Perth presents a bit of a challenge. Perth is a huge city, with many different sub-communities. It is almost impossible to design a site that is going to appeal visually to everyone in each of these communities. However, we can still localise a website design for Perth in ways that will attract more visitors searching for your business niche around Perth area as mentioned above. And of course, if you know that your main customers will come from a certain segment of the Perth population, such as those working in the main commercial district, you can then ensure the design of your website fits that visitor persona. Overall, if you are thinking about your website design, Perth offers some great ways to generate localised content. As a large, cosmopolitan city there is plenty going on, and if you can find news, events and other interesting facts about Perth that have a synergy with your company, you can use these as content themes to drive localised traffic to your site. Designing a Website that Suits an Adelaide Local Business Website designed in Adelaide style is a little simpler than Perth. As this is a smaller city, with a much smaller subset of local communities. Adelaide also has that coastal vibe going on, which is always good to leverage when you are deciding on a design for your website. Perth also has some really unique natural landmarks, some of which can be used as part of your site design to connect with local consumers. Above we mentioned how local news, events, and information can make great content themes as part of an exercise in attracting local site traffic. Adelaide is a busy city, it should be very simple to find potential content themes that suit your local business. How Much Localisation is Too Much? This is a tough question to answer. For local businesses in both Perth and Adelaide, who predominately sell to local customers, then no amount of localisation can be too much. But what about local firms who also sell nationally, or even internationally? They won’t want their websites design to be excluded from search results in other cities or countries due to being too heavily localised. So how does a local company ensure that it is also returned in international search results? The trick here is twofold. Firstly, parts of the site need to be developed and optimised for their local customers, and parts of their sites developed to be returned in generic search results. Secondly, for search engines such as Google, the site can indicate that certain pages or subdomains are intended for local traffic and certain pages for generic international search results. Is a Localised Website Right for Your Business? If you are thinking about publishing a new website in Perth or Adelaide, and a large percentage of your customers come from the local area, then yes, it simply makes sense to design a website that leverages this. It can result in higher sales volume, which obviously means more revenue. It also helps your company to extend the reach of its local brand. Get in touch with us today. DGreat Solutions has been developing fully responsive website designs for the Perth and Adelaide areas since 2014. We have the skills needed to tackle any web development project. Our team has the internal skills that ensure that every project we tackle, results in exceptional outcome every time.
If you have been doing some research towards hiring a website design firm to help you to produce a new website, then you have undoubtedly encountered many technical phrases and buzzwords. One of which is likely to be “responsive website design”. So, what does it really mean when a website designer tells you that they will create a fully responsive website layout? Let’s try and explain that right now. A Lesson in Web Design History Back in the early days of web design, things were much simpler. Most people used the same size screen (resolution). Most usually 1025×768 pixels. Think back to the old style 14” CRT monitors we used to use. Those simple, small, square display areas.Therefore, when we designed a website, we simply made sure the layout looked fine at a fixed width that was visible on the square display, that scaled up in size proportionally. So, a website designed in this way would look great at any of the standard aspect resolutions.Back then, monitors were so much more smaller, that even though we could run multiple applications at the same time, we almost always kept one at the front in a full-sized window, and the others in the background. So, a full-sized browser window would always show the older style of fixed width website accurately. But then things changed. Widescreen Woes that affected website design responsiveness Soon after TFT and LCD monitors became consumer products, we began to see widescreen resolutions become more widely used. However, these new resolutions initially only added a couple of hundred pixels to the edge of the display. This meant that fixed width websites in a full-sized browser were often wasting a lot of usable space.Web designers exploited this extra space by developing variable width websites, that could scale horizontally across the browser window. This worked great until the companies building LCD monitors gave us significantly higher resolutions, which would often break variable width websites that were designed to work at lower maximum widths. Responsive Layout is Born When the monitors we use began to offer massive increases in resolution, we began to use our PCs differently. We run multiple applications, often with one or more side by side on the same monitor. This means that windows sizes are extremely variable as opposed to how they were a decade or so ago.Simple website design techniques such as variable widths sites just couldn’t solve this problem. They would often display inaccurately within strangely sized browser windows. A new way of piecing together a website layout needed to be found. What website design experts came up with, is what we now call a responsive layout. A simple grid approach is used to plan out which parts of a website fit where. The size and location of the elements of these grid elements is driven by the actual size of the browser window.So, when a person resizes a browser window that is showing a responsive website, the entire site layout is recalculated, resized and redrawn on the fly. This means that no matter what size the browser window is (within certain minimum restraints), the website will always look the same. Mobile Miniaturisation In recent years, we have seen a massive growth in the number of smartphones and tablet devices that are being used to access websites. These devices present an additional challenge to website designers. The small screens of these devices are unable to render a traditional website and still keep it readable, the text and images are simply too small.In order to solve this problem, responsive site development techniques were improved. Now, when a website is displayed in a browser with a very small minimum width, the site can be switched over to mobile mode. In this case, each and every part of the site can use a different version designed entirely for mobile. Such as simpler menus, cut down header, and simplified footer. Cross-Device Compatibility What we have now, is a way to create websites that will always work perfectly, and look great on any device. From your high-resolution desktop monitor to your smaller laptop display, and even your tiny smartphone display.This is the real power of responsive website design. It “responds” to the browser it is being displayed within and adapts itself to work in the best way. Responsive Ecommerce Website Design Considerations When it comes to ecommerce website design, a responsive layout will always ensure that your product pages can be displayed properly on any device. Ecommerce website design has to make sure that finding, choosing and buying a product is a streamlined process, to aid in conversions. Only a responsive site design can assure this is the case across all devices and browsers. Talk to us today DGreat Solutions has been developing fully responsive website designs since 2014. With our website designers boasting of nothing less than a bachelor’s degree in computer science and related fields. We have the skills needed to tackle any web development project. The resulting website will work across all major browsers, as well as all modern mobile devices while delivering a consistent experience for all of your visitors, no matter how they are viewing your site.
With the ever-increasing volume of web-based competition, the days of hastily slapping together a website to give you a web presence are long gone. These days, in order to stand out from the crowd, you need a website design that delivers your brand message effectively, while making it easy to find and use for visitors.So, let’s take a look at a few things you should know before you actually make contact with a website design Adelaide based company. Know Your Target Market Take a step back here for a moment, and consider this fact. A website is just another piece of marketing material. Sure, it is an important one, and also one which can do more than bring in customers. But it’s very basic function is to let your current and potential customers know who your company is, and what it does.So, it makes good sense to begin the first part of a recipe for building a great website, by taking some guidance from the marketing cookbook. Specifically, know who your customers will be. In marketing terms, this means identifying key customer personas.Once we know the type of customers we are seeking, and the types of products/services they are going to be looking for, we can start to map out the scope of functionality for a website. Think About Brand Image If you are a company selling organic vegetables, you are not going to want to produce a website that makes you look like a high-tech service provider. The look and feel of a website needs to be driven by firstly our own brand image, and secondly the customer personas who we intend to attract via the website.For example, when it comes to website design Adelaide business who are providing products or services to the local community, would be well advised to create a brand image and website design that instantly reinforces this value proposition at first glance. Only once this brand image has been defined, can we start to actually develop a website. Most website development firms are happy to assist with the stage of the project, but it is best to have some idea of the required brand image you wish to portray before involving a designer. Defining Website Design Core Functionality What is your website going to be used for? Is it simply a digital equivalent of a storefront? Will you be using it to sell products? Does it need to have an online store capability? How about customer support and self-service?Before you make contact with a website design Adelaide based company, it is a good idea to have some form of a plan with regards what you actually want the website to do.When it comes to ecommerce website design it is also worth considering how you want to present your products. The structure of product types, categories, brand names etc. This will help you to communicate your needs to your site designer more effectively. Draft a Scope Document By now, you should have a pretty good idea of how you want your website to look, and what you need it to be able to do.In order to formulate these ideas in a way that will help you brief a web design firm, it is a good exercise to produce a scope document. This lays out all of the requirements you will have uncovered through previous exercises such as defining your customer, deciding on functionality, and creating a brand image.This doesn’t need to be a deeply informative document, it can be a simple list of needs. You can use this document as the initial point of discussion when you contact a website design Adelaide company. Website Designer or Website Developer? Probably the most common mistake that a business makes when setting up their first website, is buying in the wrong skillset. There are significant differences between a website designer and a website developer, thus: Website designer – skilled at creating a visual layout of a website, graphics, colour scheme and so forth. Website developer – skilled at creating backend functionality such as ecommerce applications, knowledgebase functionality etc. When you look for a website design company to build your new website, you need to find one that can offer both types of skills. As they are both needed to create a fully functioning, great looking modern website. Ready to Roll Now you have all the preliminary preparation done, it is time to actually find a website development company to action your project.You will need to discuss all of the considerations we have outlined in this article as part of the initial contact, they are going to ask you questions that are based on the kinds of things we have covered. If you have followed the steps above, you will have every answer ready. DGreat Solutions is a web development firm that has been providing website design services to the Adelaide area since 2014. We have the internal skill set to provide and end-to-end service, delivering full website design and development of effective and attractive websites.