Make no mistake about it – the design and branding elements of your website matter. Without a quality design you’ll lose potential customers, as new visitors quickly click away from your site. And without strong branding elements it will be difficult for visitors to remember your site once they leave it.
Design and Branding Support Your Bottom Line
All this doesn’t mean that you should put all of your time and energy into your website design and your online branding efforts. Design and branding shouldn’t be business goals in and of themselves. Rather, design and branding are techniques matter only insofar as they help you boost your bottom line sales numbers.
For just about every type of business, the single most important metric is going to be sales. Everything else you do with your website, on your business-focused social media accounts and every other promotional technique should ultimately have growing your sales as the goal.
Your Design Must Enable Sales
When you sell your product online, then it should be fairly obvious that in order to boost more sales you need to drive more traffic to your website. Design and branding can help you do this. For example, if your site is unattractive or boring in its visual composition, prospects are likely to assume that your products are similarly unattractive or boring. And if your site is poorly designed in a way that makes it difficult or confusing to navigate, then your prospects may assume that your products or services are equally as confusing.
Your Logo Must Not Distract From Sales
Your logo may be a strong part of your branding efforts, but from a design perspective you don’t want to over-emphasize it on your site. If your logo takes up a majority of the space “above the fold†on your home page, then you’re giving up the opportunity to make better use of that space. For example, you can use this space to better grab a visitor’s attention with an optimized headline or short marketing copy. Remember that your logo, and its placement on your site, should help you sell more of your product.
Design and Branding Need to Translate into a Better Customer Experience
Remember that you’re doing all of these design and branding things for a reason – to boost your sales – and you don’t want to lose sight of this ultimate goal. For example, let’s say a prospect comes to your website after they’ve already become well familiarized with you and your products – and they’re ready to buy. At this point, the hardest part of your job is done; someone is coming to your site prepared to give you money.
How easy have you made it for them to take this last, most important, step? Is your site’s purchasing or ecommerce function easily found on your home page? How many clicks does a prospective customer need to make before they can actually purchase? Does your website design make it easy for someone to purchase?
The issue can be exacerbated by a site design that’s particularly flashy – having such visually compelling elements in the main part of your page can draw too much attention away from the other parts of the page.
Don’t assume that a single small link or button on your home page (even if it’s at the top of the page) is going to be enough. You may have to test different website designs in order to find what works best for your product and niche.
In fact, that’s good advice for every other aspect of your website. You should always be monitoring and measuring what visitors do on your site so that you can optimize your sales.
Yeah I agree with you. Design and branding are techniques to help us boost our sales. Our design gives an impression to people. First impressions are most influenced by the visual appeal of the site. Remember First impression can last for years. So don’t post photos on your site with a low quality. This makes the people turn off.