4 Essentials When Building a New Site
- oakstreetassociates
- Jul 1, 2021
- 4 min read
Ever heard of the 15 second rule? In marketing lingo, it’s simple– you have 15 seconds to capture your audience’s attention or they leave. You can actually measure how well your site is doing in this rule by analyzing your bounce rate.
If you’ve been following our blogs, you’ve probably heard us talk about website builds, optimizations, and redesigns a few times. Not to turn this blog into a website filibuster or anything, but we think it’s super important for any business regardless of industry so we’re gonna do it again today. There’s no question that having a responsive and quality website is important. Not only is it essential to have in a digital age, but it’s also the illustration of your brand, a huge part of your customer experience, a business development source, and much much more.
Today, we want to specifically focus on building a new website and four essential components that need to be planned strategically to maximize your site’s effectiveness. These four elements include:
Brand Development – Your business’s unique personality
Although there’s a lot to dive into about branding, we are going to focus on the high level components and the value it provides when it's implemented with a well designed website. First and foremost, branding is considered to be the unique personality of your business. It’s also thought of as the umbrella term for any illustrative perception your customers hold when thinking about your business. There’s no doubt that it’s important and that it matters, especially in the digital age we live in today. It’s also something that may evolve over time but requires a deliberate and consistent plan to attract your target audience.
When it comes to building a new website and trying to incorporate your branding strategy into the website, this will take some planning and playing around with. There’s a lot of components you should think about prior to mocking up a draft. Some of the components include a site theme, logo, color choices, font, site complexity, features, simplicity, hierarchy (naturally gravitate the most important elements), navigability, consistency, accessibility, conventionality- use elements that are familiar to people, credibility, user-centricity, and much more. The next step is to ensure that branding will be consistent throughout the site and that you give your target audience a clear picture of what it is your business does and preferably, what makes your business different from the rest. Remember that 15 second rule we mentioned earlier? Of course that applies to branding!
Website Layout & Feel – Does your target audience relate?
What we mean by website layout and feel is that you need to take into account the purpose, personality, color scheme, font, and logo design. This component is important when building a new website and can be a specific segment under the branding umbrella. What we want to focus on here is essentially have an aesthetically pleasing and effective layout and site functionality.
The website and your brand also needs to adhere to your target audience’s wants and needs. This includes fine tuning every small thing to match your brand. A good question you should ask yourself is if you were in your ideal customer's shoes, what would you want to see? Do you need a site that’s picture perfect, minimalist, abstract, uniform, interactive, responsive, intuitive, etc.? Ensuring that the website’s overall layout and feel aligns with your target audience will increase your lead conversion rate.
Content & Messaging – Does your target audience engage with your content and tone?
Implementing an effective voice and tone is super beneficial to your brand and will help boost your site's ROI. The main difference to be mindful here is that brand voice is how your personality is expressed through language. Think of it this way. You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes depending on the context. You have one tone when you’re calling your friend and another when you’re meeting your boss. The next step is being consistent throughout your site and your marketing collateral.
Essentially, this can be one of the most important steps. By making sure all your elements work together in harmony, you’ll be creating differentiation from your competitors. Things get tricky when businesses grow and scale due to the fact that your brand consistency needs to be communicated effectively with the rest of the team. Tip: build a brand kit that’s accessible for all internal personnel.
Features & Integrations – Modern & responsive technology to optimize your sites functionality & performance
Having a well made and responsive site can really make a difference in your bottom line. It’s something that will provide its ROI immediately and will keep on trending in the positive direction. With the digital age we live in today, there are tons of technologically innovative advancements and progressions that can give your website the extra boost it needs to deliver strong results. Oak Street has tons of experience working with top of the line CMS’s and plugins to help deliver the feature and integration you need. If you need some help with custom based features, please get in touch with us.
If you are interested in launching a new site and the time seems right, please let us know and we are happy to help design a website to bring your vision to fruition. As a full service digital marketing & consulting agency, all our website projects include mobile and tablet optimizations, SEO, branding, graphic design, and other digital marketing services if opted in. We know web projects are complicated. We know that they matter. We make them simple. Evolve and achieve your full potential through our web design, digital marketing, and growth solutions.
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