The Design Expectations Of The Modern, Tech-Savvy Consumer

Thanks to the years of progressive website design, smart and hard-working website owners have managed to transform the web into a streamlined and attractive place to visit. Marketers and web designers have found that like with most marketing opportunities, presenting a visually appealing, easily understandable platform for your business to conduct online business is of paramount importance.

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As corporate websites have evolved to prioritize brevity, smooth user interaction, and navigability, the consumer expectation has changed. Just like a well thought-out and beautiful store space, giving your business the online ‘wow’ factor will contribute to the quality your prospective customer subconsciously assigns to the products or services you are offering.

For the new website or business owner who is not sure how to proceed in laying out their website, consulting with a website design professional and reading the following tips will be the best place for you to start.

One Step From Checkout

‘Navigability’ is a term that you’ll hear over and over during your initial construction of the website. We need not patronize you with the definition, but we can tell you how this will be correctly implemented using examples.

No matter if products or services, or a combination of the two encompass the primary revenue your business makes, you need to have the ‘checkout’ or ‘payment page’ of your website visibly marked, and able to access from any page of your site. Reduce the distance your site visitor has to travel to give you money. You might also include a visible persistent tally at the side of the screen so the consumer can see a breakdown of the costs and adjust as necessary.

This will allow you to automatically let the customer see promotions or sale items they’ve bought, and how much money they’ve saved for example. This will subconsciously encourage them to order more while they’re able to add things to the card, as they’ll feel like they have money they can apply to another item you offer.

Limits

Limited or subtle advertising and NO pop-ups aside from newsletter options will reduce how annoying your site is to visit. You ideally want to hit a 0% ‘annoying percentage.’ This is not an exact science but can be deduced by any intuitive visitor or web designer to your site. Usually, less is more.

Support

Much like your website’s checkout being a consistently available fixture of your site, it’s also fruitful to include a support option in the same vein. This might allow your customer to access your support call center on the fly if they have an issue, or even apply to speak with one of your instantly available live service agents. This lessens the client’s difficulty in resolving their issue; remember that a well-catered to customer is a loyal customer.

Genuine Information

Aside from the promotional material, it’s always helpful to make your website a genuine repository of useful information regarding your product line, and even information about the field of inquiry your product line is concerned with. For example, if you sell fishing rods, why not run a blog about the best places to fish this summer?

To use a better example of this, ‘Evernote,’ a popular note-taking software application runs stories that are useful but also pertain to the needs of a client interested in note-taking and organization. This might, in turn, reflect in a sale of your goods that might not have been achieved prior. Make sure you keep the content well-maintained to improve the ‘freshness’ of your website.

These tips, duly followed, will result in a website pleasing to all of your visitors. There is hardly a better way to build your brand image these days.