What You Need to Know and What Your Designer Will Handle
As a business owner, you can’t afford to focus all your time and energy on web design: you’ve got to hustle to find customers, handle your accounting and manage all the different parts of your company. That doesn’t mean that you can get away with knowing absolutely nothing about web design, though.
In order to make sure that you get a website that will actually help your business to grow, you need to know at least a little about actually designing a website, as well as how to find the best possible web designer. After all, you wouldn’t buy a car without knowing how to drive it or how to find a good mechanic.
What You Need to Know About Web Design
Knowing the basics of web design is a matter of vocabulary, and understanding the definitions of the words on your list. Here are a few terms to get you started.
Content Management System: In the past, a web designer was responsible for updating all the content on a site because coding was required. Now, however, there are tools, known as ‘content management systems,’ that will let you update your content. There are many options, though, so you’ll need to look into what you can work with. The most common content management systems we use are WordPress and Drupal.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Because so much online traffic is directed by search engines, you need at least a passing familiarity with how to make your site more appealing to search engines. This includes content, technical expertise, and ongoing management.
E-commerce: If you plan on selling directly through your website, you’ll be facing a few technical concerns. By reading up on e-commerce solutions early on, you can help your web designer get a better idea of what you want. Solutions for e-commerce include WooCommerce, Magento, Amazon, and other e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and Big Commerce.
What You Need to Know About Website Designers
A good web designer is always willing to discus the technology aspects of your website with you. Not only should your designer be able to come up with the right design and appearance for your site, but they should be ready to talk to you about the decisions that go into creating a reliable and useful website. If your designer isn’t comfortable with the technical elements required to develop your website, you can always work with multiple vendors with one supplying the design and the other doing the production.
Staying Up to Date on Web Design
The next website you have created for your company isn’t likely to be the last site you’ll ever need. Most companies find it necessary to update their sites regularly, as well as may need specialized sites or pages for individual promotions or projects. That makes it worth your while to keep up to date on what’s going on in the world of web design.
5 Tips to Changing Your Brand Without Losing Customers
Redoing your website and print branding can refresh your business’ image and help you attract new customers — but such changes can be less beneficial for your existing customers. When you’ve invested time and money into creating a brand, updating it can make your business less recognizable to your clients, as well as lead them to question if you’re changing anything else.
Handling such a change carefully is important to making sure your customers stick with you through the process.
Bring your clients in on the process. Especially if you want to continue to target the same market, connecting with your existing customer base gives you opportunities to really find out where you can tweak or revamp your branding. You have the added benefit of being able to warn customers about coming changes to your brand long before they need to be comfortable with them.
Make the changeover personal. It’s a rare business that doesn’t rely on personal connections to keep customers happy. And what holds true in customer service is also true when your business is in transition. Take the time to reach out to customers and clients personally — whether the owner or another representative of the business makes the call — means that they’re more likely to even be aware of the change, which makes it much easier for them to spot your mail, online communications and other branding materials.
Explain the transition. Since most businesses don’t rebrand at the drop of a hat, there’s probably some logic behind the decision to change things up. Take the time to share that reasoning with your customers, especially those that you particularly look forward to working with in the future.
Follow up after rebranding. You may not have to follow the communications process too carefully, though if you’re sending out invoices and similarly crucial business documents under your new brand, you should certainly make the effort. When a customer recognizes your email newsletters or your mailing envelopes, sending out anything that looks differently will make it harder for them to pull those communications out of the piles that most people and businesses receive over the course of a day. Following up can be the only way to be sure that your messages get through.
Live up to customers’ prior experiences. The truth behind the matter is that your customers may be unsure about what your transition means for them. They chose to work with you, in part because of your branding. Whether you’re changing what customers you focus your branding for or are just changing your color palette, you’re no longer exactly the business a client signed up to work with. The only way to address this problem is to continue to offer great services or products so that your customers can tell that, behind your new branding, your business’ values are still the same.
With these steps, you can move your business to the next level while still maintaining your connections with your customers or clients.
