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12.01 – Constructing Elements of a Successful Website

Your website isn’t just an introduction to your brand; it’s the trailhead for a customer journey to lifetime value. The online path from introduction to loyalty is laden with critical strategic elements, including creative, design, interaction, decision support, calls to action, incentives, and more. Essential elements of business-building websites include the following:

Additionally, syncing your site for search engine optimization (SEO) – increasing your visibility in online searches for products or services related to your business – is a basic aspect of all successful websites.

As you develop these essential elements, keep in mind that your website often establishes the first impression consumers will have of your brand and provides credibility for everything you say, promise, and offer online or off-line. The tone, style, design, navigation, and content of your website make a statement about how contemporary or out of touch your brand or products are. If your website is stale, unengaging, and infrequently refreshed, consumers will consciously or unconsciously – likely both – come to the same conclusion about your products, service, and overall experience.

Don’t be sloppy! If your website has typos, broken links, misaligned paragraphs, confusing or inaccurate text, expired offers, and so on, you’re signalling to customers that you produce poor quality for the products or services you offer.

Clearly Defined Goals and Calls to Action

The driving goal behind all the pages of carefully crafted content and creative you develop for your website should be to engage visitors in your message and move them from your landing page to fulfilling a specific call to action. Your call to action may be for visitors to request a demo, call your sales team, download a paper, register for an event, or complete an online transaction.

The first step in building a website, then, is to define the goals or purpose of your web page and the actions you want visitors to take.

Goals

What’s the primary goal you need your website to achieve to build sales and grow your business? Do you want to spark conversations with potential customers? Communicate details about your offerings? Drive visitors to retailers or distributors? Or do you want them to complete a purchase on your e-commerce page or contact you to set up a product demo or consultation?

Define your goals and stay laser-focused on them as you build out calls to action along with every other element of your page. This will help you avoid wasting time and money on elements that don’t support your goals.

Just because a technology or plug-in exists doesn’t mean you need to use it. Consider how each element of your website drives visitors toward your end goal. Using tools that don’t relate to the journey you need customers to take can be distracting to users and waste a lot of time and money.

Call to Action

Your call to action is exactly that: the action you’re calling out for your visitors to take that will add value to their lives and profit to your bottom line. A call to action may ask consumers to:

Building your website’s navigation and content flow around these actions will keep visitors focused on your end goal and increase your chances of conversion.

Easy-to-Follow Navigation

Easy-to-follow navigation is a critical component of a successful website. With countless template options available across many website builder platforms, it’s fairly simple to ensure your website is easy to navigate.

Website builders help you set up categories and tabs for your information, create a logical and an easy-to-follow flow, and organise your site’s content. Although it seems like a no-brainer to just follow the template’s directions to build your website, it isn’t always easy to organise your content in ways that keep visitors on a journey to closing a sale or completing another action, and enable them to quickly find what they want.

When building your navigation paths, keep in mind why visitors come to your site. Do they come to find product information, make a transaction, or compare you to competitors? Or download content that can help them make informed decisions about your category and brand?

Your navigation needs to make it easy for your visitors to find the trailhead to the path they want to take immediately upon landing on your site. Label your tabs according to the most travelled paths on your site and provide buttons and hot links throughout the site so visitors can find what they want no matter which page they’re on at any given time.

Is Your Website Polite or Downright Rude?

Bryce Tanner, owner of Upside Down Digital, a small business that provides website strategies, design, and development for other small business owners, warns against executing a “rude” or annoying website experience: “You wouldn’t hire a rude receptionist to be the first impression for your brand, so why would you maintain a ‘rude’ or offensive website?” Tanner defines online rudeness as:

Tanner also believes poor website navigation makes a huge statement about your attitude toward customer care and overall customer experience. If you don’t care that customers have to struggle through a sloppy or confusing website, you may not care about ensuring that they are happy with your products, can easily and comfortably return or exchange items, and so on.

You should also make it easy for visitors to find:

Clean and Inviting Design

Your website design is critical to the image you project about your brand, products, or services. Your website is where you need to use the colours, iconology, fonts, and images you’ve identified as relevant to the personas, lifestyles, and values of your target customers. All the elements and sections of your website should consistently adhere to your creative strategy. These include:

One of the most important elements of design is white space. Websites crammed full of copy and photos take too much time and effort to read and understand. Visitors don’t want to have to work that hard to follow your message and discover your offers and value to them. Maintaining white space throughout your site makes it easy for visitors to scan your content and quickly find what they’re there to find. Both outcomes are critical to maintaining a healthy session duration and bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave your site without taking action), and avoiding “rudeness.”

Meaningful Content That Adds Value

The first headline on your website is far more important than you may realise. According to digital marketing analysts, your website has less than a second to project relevance to visitors, and your supporting copy has 15 seconds to capture their attention and inspire further reading.

To achieve longer dwell time, or longer session durations that can lead to conversions, you need to keep your content focused on what matters most to consumers.

Give Consumers What They Want Up Front

Adding dwell time to the visits your website gets is really as simple as showing customers something valuable right away.

Here’s a little exercise to help you identify and develop website content that delivers what customers are looking for and drives desired outcomes:

Top Reasons People Come to Your Website

List the top reasons people come to your website. For example:

Vary Your Formats to Add Greater Appeal

Content is more than the headlines and copy throughout your site. It’s the information and resources you share that add value to your brand relationship and website experience. Content that engages and keeps visitors on your site often sits on a Resources page and contains the following:

Blogs: Your regular updates and commentaries on brand, industry, market, and social issues
Decision support: Checklists, guidelines, how-to tips, and other resources to help consumers make wise decisions
News: Press releases and media mentions for your brand
Videos: Product videos, testimonials, leadership statements, educational assets, and so on
Case studies and testimonials: Stories and recommendations your customers share about your product or service, and their positive experiences with your brand

Building a Resources page that houses key content on your site makes it easy for users to find what they want and increases the chances of their reading your carefully crafted content.

Tagging thumbnail photos of each piece of content will help elevate your SEO results. You can tag your photos, blog pages, and more in the administrative areas of your website.

Videos are an important engagement tool that should be used on your landing pages to capture interest and deliver an interactive story about your brand. Key sections like testimonials, product pages, and brand pages can be more memorable with short videos focused on the messaging that matters most to your customers. Not only do videos add energy, but video content has a 95 percent retention rate compared to 10 percent for text content.

Interaction That Pulls Visitors into Your Brand Story

The NTL Institute has long studied retention from various styles of learning. They’ve found that a lecture-based, classroom atmosphere results in around 5 percent retention of the content presented, while activity-based learning achieves a 75 percent retention rate. The same principle applies to website engagement.

The longer you are actively engaged on a website doing something you deem to be of value to you, the more you’re likely to view additional pages, recall the information you browsed, and convert to the desired call to action. Consider:

While technology is making it more affordable to incorporate interactivity into your website, you shouldn’t do something just because you can. If you’re going to put a game or quiz on your site, it needs to be highly relevant to your brand or category, and the experience most likely to convert visitors to customers.

Many forms of interactivity are simple and affordable yet powerful for keeping people engaged on your website and increasing their page views. Here’s list of some effective and easy-to-use interactive elements, tools, and strategies:

Slide shows featuring hot topics and news. Putting a slide show at the top of your landing page that auto rotates slides featuring hot topics, current news, and business updates is a great way to get people engaged in your content without having to begin scrolling. Slide shows are most effective when kept to 3 or 4 slides that rotate every 2 to 3 seconds.
Videos that tell compelling stories. Video is a highly effective way to increase stickiness, sometimes called dwell time, which in turn improves SEO results and customer conversion. The key is to make sure the content is relevant to the decision process, energetic enough to keep visitors’ attention, and just 30 to 60 seconds in length. Brief, fast-paced testimonial videos are a good example of videos with watching power.
Tools that help visitors with calculations and decision planning. If you are in the financial services field, calculators to help customers compute mortgage, car loan, home equity, and other payments are highly effective. These tools keep people on your site as they calculate various scenarios and get them to come back every time they want to calculate something new.
Live chat that answers visitors’ burning questions. A study by eMarketer showed that 63 percent of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. Another study by Forrester reported that people who engage in live chat are nearly three times more likely to convert to the desired action. Live chat plays to our need for instant gratification and our growing preference to communicate by typing instead of talking. Many providers of customer relationship management systems, like HubSpot, offer live chat platforms for your website that you can staff with employees who can talk about your brand and serve your customers.
Brand communities that bring customers together. Online communities like Reddit have gained a lot of traction among social media users and likely will continue to be popular for a long time. We seek tribes of people like ourselves, online and off-line, and we often ask our tribes for shopping advice or validation for decisions we have just made, opinions we hold, and so on. Creating a community chat forum on your site that allows customers and prospects to mingle and discuss usage stories for your product can help convert visitors and increase loyalty for existing users. Encouraging user-generated content from your community members can create fun engagement as well.

Brand communities can backfire when users post negative comments and stories, and they require constant monitoring so you can respond to comments and provide your brand’s view. If you allow user-generated content, you will need someone to vet the content before it’s posted to weed out inappropriate posts, comments, and images.

Direct Relevance

Users leave a website within 10 to 20 seconds if they don’t find something of direct relevance to the need they’re looking to fill. Adding information that’s intuitive to users’ reasons for visiting your site can ease the decision process and keep them dwelling on your pages longer, increasing your chances of deeper engagement and conversion.

Consider the intuitive nature of websites for ski resorts during ski season. You log on and immediately see widgets that show snow totals, current and forecasted weather, and even wait times for ski lifts. You easily find links to lift ticket sales, restaurants, and things to do at the resort. And, of course, you see a beautiful visual of an amazing skier doing just what you want to be doing in all that powder and sunshine. All this information allows you to see yourself in the brand’s story and inspires you to stay on the site planning your dream ski vacation.

All brand communication must present something of real and direct value to consumers. Otherwise, they will not stay on your website, browse through your pages, open your emails, and move toward completing a sales transaction. Your mission is to assure your website uses words and images that relate to the customer’s needs, not yours. Showing a photo of your product in its packaging is not as compelling as showing the joy someone might receive from the product or service you offer.