If you own a shop and it’s hard to see through the windows, you’re in trouble. It’s exactly the same in the online world – if your shop front or website isn’t appealing, or doesn’t stand out from the others, potential customers will simply pass you by. Within seconds, those potential customers will move on to another window – in this case another website – which attracts their attention and…boom. They’ve gone.
So, how do you make yourself the best dressed online window on the street and stand out? Even though we’re a top line web design agency, we took a good look at ourselves and asked that question. Here’s what we did…and we’re going to share our secret with you.
“Too many call to actions will confuse a visitor…”
Tweet ThisWe took our inspiration from Harry Selfridge, the maestro who created the best shop windows in the world. He said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” It’s a bit of a tongue twister, but we agree! In order to be noticed, web design matters – from the words, the image, the logo and the colours. They all describe who you are. That’s your identity. Your brand. Your voice. So, our first step at Zebedee Creations was to agree what we wanted to look and sound like. As a creative agency we had lots of opinions on what our “voice” should be like and our first step was to agree this. For example, we knew we wanted to include the phrases “unique”, “stylish” and “trustworthy”.
Because design is naturally important to us, we mixed our existing serif and san serif fonts which resulted in a merge of a typical ‘old style’ serif with a mono sans font. This brings an element of interest to the brand – rather than the over used sans only style. It’s also in vast contrast to our previous look, which is perfect for our 20th birthday!
Once we were happy with the overall look and feel – the design – we brought the team in to get their thoughts, and this is where any designer gets nervous, especially a web designer! We made a few revisions, mainly about the landing area of the homepage, but on the whole, the new voice of the brand was approved. Phew!
One of our key web design challenges was to make the services area easier to navigate with the lowest number of click throughs to other pages. We wanted to make as much information available as quickly as possible without the user being overloaded and confused. This would cause them to walk out of our “shop”. Our lead web developer, Romain, made a key observation at this point,
“Too many call to actions will confuse a visitor, pointing them in too many directions. Keep the call to actions to a minimum , ideally just one so that the single goal on the web page is clear”.
He was right.
After lots of coffee-fuelled discussions, we decided to consolidate the pages from the previous site and also ensure we used language clients & prospective clients would understand.
Although the design and build of the new website and branding took slightly longer than we initially thought, the time spent getting things right was worth it. Those first attention-grabbing Selfridges windows weren’t created overnight.
Redesigning a website or brand can be a daunting prospect for any business owner and finding the right web design agency to help you and taking the time to make sure it’s right are vital.