Website design to help build your business
How can a new website help my business?
You may have heard the term that your website is your digital ‘shop window’. This is as true for sites selling products as it is for services. Today’s savvy customer doesn’t just find a number in the phone book, they have endless information available on the internet. This means they can research before they buy, read positive and negative reviews, watch case study videos, view images and hunt around for prices without ever talking to you or your competitors. Ultimately the decision of whether to buy from you can happen without you ever even being involved in the conversation.
This can be both a blessing and a curse. It may help to sift out the most interested customers, or it can mean you never have the chance to sell in a personal, direct way. Both of these prove the importance of your website and the way your potential customers interact with you through it.
If your business involves e-commerce, your website is obviously a critical part of the way customers interact with you. From the first visit to the website through the end product arriving safely with your customer, there are a lot of elements to consider and a lot that has the potential to go wrong along the way. Between up-to-date, accurate product information, taking payments, changing subscriptions, managing stock levels and delivery dates, shipping weight thresholds, holding private data and more, there are many things to think about. Square Balloon brings extensive experience in e-commerce, to help you to provide the best customer journey possible.
What does a website do?
If we look at the two examples given above, it’s easy to see the hard work that your website can do you on your behalf. At Square Balloon we help you to make sure your website talks to your ideal customer and really targets what they need to hear in terms of information and reassurance. Working in tandem with our brand definition services, we can help to make sure your website sells you and your product in the best light, highlighting the things that you know your customers want to know. This works both to attract the right customers and reduce the number of enquiries from people who will never go on to buy from you, a huge time-saver.
Great website design results in a site that feels intuitive and easy to interact with. It’s not just visually how it looks that attracts people. Square Balloon considers loading time, attracting people with multi-media, the sales funnel and the customer journey you would like people to take to prevent any unnecessary barriers.
At Square Balloon, we don’t just design a website for the immediate need, we talk to you about how you will need it to work for you as your business grows. This may include in-built CRM tools, ensuring your website communicates with your stock control software, preparing for future e-commerce, giving the functionality to add blogs yourself, driving people to sign up to a mailing list to become part of a campaign run through Mailchimp – the options are both endless and bespoke to what you need. We don’t just build you a website that looks nice, we make it efficient and effective.
How should my website fit into the rest of my brand?
Depending on your business, your website may play a few different roles. It can act as a brochure for product options (such as tile options for driveways or colour options for paint finishes), as a direct to customer e-commerce shop (selling anything that will then be posted directly without the customer ever meeting you in person), as an information hub (showing your location, menu, service options etc. for businesses with a bricks and mortar location), to host your own digital product offering (for online teachers, coaches, personal trainers etc.) or to drive bookings (for estate agents, training, etc.). The purpose and aim of your website isn’t separate to the website design and Square Balloon will determine exactly what you need it to do, creating you a bespoke website that is part of your unique brand identity.
Whatever your business, your website plays an important role in your brand experience. That is, the way it feels to interact with your brand, even when you are not there to talk about it in person. Making things simple, clear and easy for customers is a great start in your relationship with them and can really set you apart from competitors.
How can I get the most out of my website?
When you choose Square Balloon for your website design, we guarantee a score of 90% or higher for Google Lighthouse on desktop.
Google Lighthouse considers speed, accessibility and large file handling: these things aren’t just important for pushing you up the search rankings with SEO, they are also very important to your customers. Accessibility factors mean that all of your customers can understand what your business is about equally. And page loading speed is a key factor in how long someone will spend on your website. We all know how frustrating slow loading speed can be and how easy it is just to click ‘back’ on the browser and find a more readily available option instead, which will undoubtedly be a page from your competitor’s website.
Square Balloon servers are based in the UK. This means that pages load faster as there is less digital distance to travel, and the server location is high security both virtually and physically with additional on-line back-ups just in case anything should ever happen, allowing your business to get back up and running very quickly. These UK-based servers ensure all data is held in a GDPR compliant way too, one less thing to worry about when you are handling information and making sure you build trust with your customers.
A purpose-built website design by Square Balloon allows you to think about what you would really like to achieve to grow your business. It shouldn’t just look good but it should work hard for you too. This may be in the form of strong SEO results so that potential customers can find you easily. Our experienced SEO team are able to advise on the most effective key words and terms to use in your content as well as tracking the way your market changes to ensure your website continues to pull in customers from Google searches. Google has high standards to produce the most accurate search results and understanding how to optimise results for your business is a specialist skill that involves both experience and data.
Your website can also be designed to heavily reduce admin with certain processes automated in the back-end software. Square Balloon create bespoke software solutions for everything from CRM to stock control or your new website can be built to integrate with your current systems. To maximise the way that this works for your customers you may consider online chat functionality or the option to text people rather than email, to produce the most suitable customer journey for your business.
To track the effectiveness of your website, Square Balloon track data including contact forms, number of visitors and phone number clicks. You will have full access to this data, so you know how your site is performing. If you prefer not to login, we can set up a monthly report to be delivered directly to your inbox.
How do Square Balloon work with you on your website?
To understand what you would like your website design to achieve in the immediate and long-term future, the process starts with an in-depth discussion with you about your business. The Square Balloon team of experts bring a combination of technical and marketing skills together to consider each goal that you would like to achieve with the best information possible. As part of the proposal process, we will develop a sitemap with you, confirming which pages your website will need to provide an accurate quote and timings according to your personal requirements. As you progress through the stages of the project, you will be able to see the content and design built before it is coded up for the final website so that you will have a clear idea of what it will look like and how it will work before it is turned into code and ready for launch.
We have an in-house team that can build your whole website or fill in the gaps that you need, from content writers to photographers, animators to videographers, designers to software developers. We also bring extensive experience and can advise on the best use and placement of testimonials, accreditations, images and videos to attract and retain interest, engaging copy and the hierarchy of the messages on your website.
Security for your website is vital. All websites in today’s age need to be secure. The risk of hacking increases every day with better technology such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Although you may think nobody has a reason to hack your website, in today’s world it is not humans who are hacking websites. It is automated software which simply works its way round the web looking for weaknesses, so it can exploit them. These exploits range from posting content on your site e.g., competitors’ content or phishing scams such as PayPal pages. We take additional steps to prevent your site from being hacked, including extra layers of protection and two-factor authentication.
There are many applications and platforms that allow everyday users to create something that looks nice nowadays, but nothing matches the bespoke approach of working with a graphic designer who understands your business and can create you something unique.