Most Websites Are Useless, but Yours Doesn’t Have to Be

Chances are, your company’s website is getting half the attention it deserves. Why? Because you’re approaching design all wrong. If you have a website simply because you think you should, you’re not going to maximize its value. We live in a fast, mobile world. As potential customers learn who you are, they’ll turn to your site to fill in the gaps. But if people get there and find an uninspiring, a confusing, or downright poor design, they’ll head for greener pastures. Your goal is to build strong relationships with people and to ultimately earn their business. Here’s how a solid design can help.

Treat your site as an employee, not a business card

A website is your most reliable employee. It never has a bad day, it’s always working, and it’s always doing exactly what you tell it to do.

The problem is that a lot of companies don’t approach their website builds as they would when hiring a new employee. If you think of your site as a brochure, you’re naturally going to attempt to pack as much information into it as possible. If you attempt to answer every question a potential customer might have, you’ll end up adding a lot of unnecessary information and confusing people.

When people come to your site, they’re looking for the story behind your business, what you offer, and whether they can trust you. They also expect a pleasant, easy experience. A strategically designed site is built in a way that makes doing business with you as simple as possible.

Set a clear vision for your website

How you design your site and which features or information you include should be unique to you, your niche, and your customer base. Every company has different needs. While most of them may be looking for growth, how your particular brand goes about fostering that growth will be distinct. Your website is there to help your customers get to the next step.

But be wary of having too many cooks in the kitchen. If everyone in the company gives feedback, there’s a good chance the purpose of the new site will get gummed up with ego. Everyone wants to make sure his or her vision shines through. They all want their opinions heard. If you let the site design get bogged down with multiple visions at once, your new site is likely going to fail to deliver real results. Your vision needs to be crystal clear.

If you’re not a designer or a developer, don’t do it yourself

Let an expert handle it. It’s very easy to put together something that looks like a website. But just because your contact information is up there, that doesn’t mean folks will respond. If you want a website that grows your business and works for you, you need to hire an expert. Great designers and developers don’t just make stuff to order; they work closely with you to build solutions to meet your business’s unique challenges.

As for us, we aren’t developers. Some of Bonfire’s employees know a little about web development. But we’re not experts — that’s why we leave it to the professionals. We work with trusted developers when building a site for a client, but we don’t develop in-house because we understand we’ll get better results when an expert handles it.

Remember to have a clear idea of what you want your website to do, then hire a professional to help you figure out how to make that happen. In the age of site templates and WYSIWYG web builders, it’s easy to forget that the technical skills are only a small portion of what web design really is. The most important part of great design is filling a need. What does your website need?