Are you looking for an East Bay website designer? Your company’s website is perhaps the single most important part of your online presence. When a website is good, it communicates clearly and easily with your audience everything that they need to know about your brand and what it stands for. But when a website is lackluster or confusing, users quickly lose patience and click away.
If your website is underperforming for any number of reasons, you risk losing the interest and loyalty of your audience. Of course, your goal is to retain those users and provide them with excellent content and services. One way to guarantee that your website is optimized for a great user experience is to hire a website designer. Professional website designers understand the most efficient and effective ways to streamline your website and make it both visually appealing and informative, which results in an exponentially growing happy consumer base!
There are several indicators that your website may be underperforming or may not be as effective as it could be. Here’s when you need an East Bay website designer to maximize your website’s potential.
1) You are Building a Website from Scratch
If your company is building a website from the ground up, you need a sturdy foundation for it to grow on. The best way to avoid running into problems later is to start with a solid base. Especially if you are just starting out, there is so much content to organize and consider: What do you want your customers to see immediately when they visit your home page? What is your brand image, and how can you most effectively express that through the digital format? How will your customers contact you? How will you organize your tabs, schedule appointments, or present blog content?
How a website designer can help: East Bay website designers do this for a living. When they look at a mass of content and data, they see ways to logically organize it into clickable sections that won’t overwhelm a user. They see opportunities for call-to-action buttons, ways to draw a customer’s eye across a page, and different places that your users may run into obstacles. By hiring a website designer during the beginning of the building process, you avoid problems that could develop later on and ensure that your website’s foundation is enticing, beautiful, and easy to use.
Fact: If the content and the layout of a website are unattractive, 38% of people will stop engaging immediately.
2) The “Flow” of Your Website Needs Improvement
A user’s first experience navigating your website should feel naturally intuitive. With your website layout, there should be a clear course of action for any information, services, or pages that your clients need to access. Don’t underestimate the importance of a straightforward, pleasant user experience: in fact, 89% of consumers shop with a competitor after a poor user experience. If barriers or confusing information blunt your users’ progress, they are likely to lose interest and never finish the task.
How a website designer can help: An East Bay website designer has experience and skill in organizing the features and tools on your website. Clearly labeled buttons, graphics, and shorter content can all be tools in improving the user’s experience. The ultimate goal is to remove all obstacles and hindrances that would distract or otherwise impede your users. Make each corner of the website interesting, and encourage the user to explore each tab. By implementing specific and proven techniques, a website designer can streamline the user experience so it remains engaging, informative, and satisfying.
3) Your Website Design Lacks Luster
When a user first logs on to your website, you don’t want any of their thoughts to sound like: Oh, wow, this must have been created ten years ago, or Who made this, my grandpa?! An outdated, randomly designed website sends a message to your clients that you are out-of-touch. This is a crucial impression. If you don’t take care of your website, how can clients trust you to take care of them?
Not only is website design a customer’s first glimpse into everything that makes your brand stand out, it’s the best way you can directly communicate with your audience. For your audience to reciprocate, however, your website needs to consider presentation. In fact, 75% of website credibility comes from design. This statistic tells us that brand trust develops when a website is thoughtfully designed with the user experience in mind.
How a website designer can help: An East Bay website designer will be able to take your brand vision and relay it into a thoughtful, intuitive, and attractively designed hub for your audience to peruse. Website designers have the expertise and training to move beyond the cookie-cutter website designs of your competitors and present you with something truly unique. With the eye and creativity of a web designer, your site’s features will reflect the values and brand persona of your company while appealing to your audience.
Fact: An eye-tracking study by Missouri University found that it takes less than two tenths of a second to develop a first impression of a website.
4) Your Mobile Website isn’t Optimized
We all know the experience: You search for a company’s website on your phone, but when you click on it, something strange happens. The proportions are all wrong. You can’t see half of the text. Where there should be a clean, navigable website is a bundle of unformatted links and cut-off text. The whole thing is rendered incomprehensible, so you exit the tab and launch a search for a new company. Just like that, a company lost what could have been a paying customer, simply because their mobile website was subpar.
In today’s world where our phones are glued to our sides, an optimized mobile website is nonnegotiable for creating a site that reaches your customers. No matter your target audience’s age, gender, race, or nationality, there’s a good chance that a huge proportion of them will require mobile access.
Fact: 74% of users are more likely to return to mobile-friendly websites. A relevant statistic proves that 70% of time spent scrolling on the internet is on mobile devices. With mobile browsing becoming the norm, your brand has to keep up with the times to meet your audience’s needs.
For your company to even show up on Google as a search result, your website must be optimized for mobile. Google takes mobile-friendliness into consideration when ranking search results. This means that a client may type in the exact keywords that you have plastered all over your relevant blog posts, but your website will show up on the fifth or sixth page of Google if it’s not mobile-friendly.
How a website designer can help: An East Bay website designer will be able to translate your website into an excellent mobile experience. To test how mobile-friendly your website is, you can use Google’s free mobile-friendly checker tool. Based on these results and the website designer’s professional assessment, you can begin to build a new mobile-optimized site that consumers will enjoy. This responsive design allows users to navigate your site from any device. Plus, mobile websites offer functions that standard websites do not, such as push notifications and call-to-action buttons.
5) Your Website is S – L – O – W
In the modern era, people have certain expectations about what a website experience should look like. Those expectations do NOT include lengthy loading bars that never seem to reach 100%, nor do they include the rainbow spinner cursor that indicates: yep, it’s still loading. People expect to click on a page and have it appear. And when it doesn’t…?
You guessed it. They lose interest. They click away. You lose business and credibility. So much of website design these days is simply removing inconveniences. There should never be a point on your website that allows a consumer to get bored. In fact, slow-loading websites lead to a $2.6 billion revenue loss each year. This one easily-solvable obstacle is the downfall of so many websites. Even increasing your site’s speed by one second can improve conversion rates by 7%.
How a website designer can help: A website designer will be able to pinpoint where and why your pages are slowing down. They can help streamline your site, removing unnecessary code that is dragging down your loading times, and ensure that users never have to wait. Just this one simple fix can keep customers on your website longer. Plus, faster loading times means more time for the customer to explore whatever products or services you have to offer.
Talk to an East Bay Website Designer
At D-Kode Technology, we work closely with our clients to transform the company vision into a seamless online experience. Our results-driven approach makes website design and digital marketing easy. If you’re looking for a reputable East Bay website designer to maximize your site’s potential, contact D-Kode Technology at 925.856.5342 or visit our website to schedule your free consultation. We translate the Internet.
