So you're redesigning your website to increase your ability to market your business. That's great. So now what are the first steps to web design?
Believe it or not we don't start designing websites with anything visually. We first need to understand a few things to be able to build a move effective online sales funnel. The first step is to map out the buyer journey for your visitors. This starts with the home page because that is the first thing anyone sees unless they are coming from a referral website, direct traffic, social media, or other means.
Top of the Home Page
This is the awareness stage of the buyer journey. At the top of the home page is where we put the top of the funnel information. These are new visitors who probably haven't even been on your website before. They may just have found out about your business and are in the first stage of the buyer journey.
What we need is an image or video that resonates with these potential customers. Over the top of that will be your biggest answer your customers are looking for with calls to action for where they need to go.
Middle of the Home Page
This is the assessment stage of the buyer journey. What we used to want is clicks but it's much easier to engage a visitor via scrolling down. So here we'll put your value proposition or "calll outs" for more answers for your visitors that connect the users to your services. We want to answer our visitors questions rather than state our services.
Bottom of the Home Page
This is the decision stage of the buyer journey. Here our visitors have decided that it's time to contact you for direct answers to their questions. Here we would usually give ways to make contact via a contact form, phone number, email, or however else your company manages their sales process. Example:
Internal Pages
Now that the home page is designed we'll fill in the other parts of the website with general information pages consisting of:
Our calls to action from the home page and other internal pages will be directed to these pages and mapped for each stage of the process.
Once we have our layout for the home page and these core internal pages defined we'll start thinking about visual aspects. We'll want to tie each text piece to a visual piece. This is how our brains work best when we have left and right working together.
When the core website is built then we launch as soon as we are ready. This is where the real work begins because we now have our vehicle for running inbound marketing campaigns. The end result is directing visitors to a landing page where they can be converted to a lead.
Does your website adapt to mobile devices? Or do you know if it does?