Is your website looking dated or struggling to impress when compared to competitor sites? What do you think this does to your business image and reputation? Effective and custom web design is essential for businesses in all different industries, from those in the medical field to hard-working tradies. In this blog, we’ll go through how custom website design and development can benefit your business.
Key benefits of custom web design and development
Custom websites build personality and brand
No matter what industry you are in, your business has a unique brand. Having a website built with your brand, industry, and goals in mind makes your business appear professional and have you stand out amongst your competitors. A custom design integrates all of your brand elements from colours and images to relevant content, as opposed to a ready-built theme that lacks personalisation and brand representation.
To take it one step further, you can match your website visuals and messaging to your other channels (for instance, social media posts and ads, direct marketing campaigns) to provide a cohesive experience to users whenever they interact with you.
Best user experience
Before developing your website, the agency or developer should be asking you about your business goals. Similarly, you’ll want to have an idea of the customer journey with regard to your product or service. Designing your website with user experience in mind ensures that a visitor can easily navigate your site and find relevant information.
This way, you can guide them to completing an action such as filling out a form or giving you a call. You want to make the customer journey straightforward – don’t make your visitors go searching for information or ways to contact you!
Safe and secure
At least one cybercrime is reported every 10 minutes in Australia – these crimes include fraud, identity-related crimes, and ransomware. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who is browsing a website, you almost certainly wouldn’t trust a site that pops up with “your connection is not private” right?
That is the last thing you want your users to encounter before they visit your site, hence why having a secure website is of paramount importance. You also want to ensure that vicious hackers can’t take over your site and ruin all your hard work!
SEO-optimised
Custom website design allows your site to be built according to specific SEO strategies that will support higher rankings on search engines.
A custom website is also designed to be highly relevant and informative to visitors. And when content is helpful, visitors stay on your website for longer, which indicates to Google that your site must be helpful for a particular search term, and this will reflect in your ranking.
Another important element of your SEO strategy is the loading speed. 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. By taking advantage of custom web development, you can work with the developer to ensure that your site loads quickly by compressing images or ensuring there are as few plugins as necessary to avoid long loading periods, which encourages users to stick around.
And here are other ways in which a custom-designed website can improve your SEO strategy, boosting your search engine ranking:
- Meta titles and descriptions – These show the title of the web page and its description. Make use of effective meta titles and descriptions as well as website content that incorporates relevant keywords.
- Site structure – Are your services listed in one tab, or can they be categorised further? Site structure is about how you organise your website’s content. We recommend that your structure is in a pyramid shape, so the homepage is at the top, followed by the main categories, and subcategories. Implementing a good site structure offers a user-friendly experience and enables Google to understand what your site is about so it can indexed quickly.
Mobile-friendly
Did you know that 46% of you are most likely reading this on a mobile device? While websites can be experienced on mobile devices, most are not optimised for mobile. They typically lack the features that make for a quality mobile experience. With custom web design, the designer can create a separate interface that is tailored for mobile users. This allows for a better user experience and a clearer call to action.
Mink Media Are Here To Answer Questions About Custom Website Design & Development
Implementing a custom web design for your business should not be seen as an expense, but rather as an investment that will help lead generation and business growth. If you are looking for a company to guide you through custom website design and development, look no further than Mink Media! We are an Australian-based company that focuses on e-commerce web design & development, SEO, and digital marketing. Contact us today and find out how we can help your business.
