18 Smart Business South Florida | November 2010

Insights Web Design, Development & Internet Marketing

Insights Web Design, Development & Internet Marketing is brought to you by Bayshore Solutions

Great design = leads & salesHow to achieve the critical balance of website usability, design, SEO and results

Beauty may often be in the eye of the beholder, but for business website design, beauty is as beauty does.

Kevin Hourigan, president and CEO of Bayshore Solutions, a Web design, Web development and Internet marketing agency, cautions business leaders that design itself is just a portion of today’s website requirements.

“Great Web design blends both art and science to powerfully balance all of the elements vital to the success of your website,” says Hourigan.

Smart Business spoke with Hourigan about how to ensure your website has a great design.

Why does great Web design = leads and sales?

This equation describes the cause and effect of a successful business website. ‘Design’ incorporates and balances all of the things that are important to your website’s success.

Different aspects of design address distinct purposes, channels and end-users. There are specific requirements when designing for:

n Look and feel: communication of corporate brand and message.

n SEO: competitive visibility and ‘friendliness’ to the various search engine crawlers.

n Devices: consistent experiences for users of computers, smart phones, iPads, etc.

n Results: navigation and usability to accelerate lead or sales conversions.

Great Web design produces an attrac-tive, consistent approach for all audi-ences of your website: people, engines and devices.

What is the key to Web design for each of these audiences?

The prerequisite to effective design is to fully understand all of your site’s visi-tors. Who and what will look at it? What are their expectations? What is the end result you want them to get out of the visit?

Simply put, knowing your target audi-ence is Marketing 101. Beyond this re-quirement, let’s take a look at website audiences and the related dynamics you need to include in your strategy before you set fingers to keyboard, or stylus to

canvas, in ‘design.’n Devices: If you are not currently ad-

dressing the multiple ways the Internet is accessed, and how your website looks on each of them, then you are behind the competition and losing more ground dai-ly. There is no uniform technical proto-col or standard among today’s spectrum of devices. iPhones, Androids, other smartphones, iPads, laptop computers, traditional desktop stations, web TVs, varying screen resolutions and brows-ers used will all impact the experience of your website’s quality and effective-ness. Ignoring one or some could be a fatal business decision now or in the near future.

Knowing your audiences and their typical device use can help prioritize your design for device strategy, but be aware that this dynamic is a moving tar-get. A case in point is the Web browser Internet Explorer, which held nearly 70 percent of global usage market share two years ago. Now, CNN reports that in early October 2010 it holds 49 percent — less than half of all users. How does your website render on browsers other than IE?

n Search Engines: This audience isn’t even human, but is critical to your web-site’s success. Design that accommo-

dates the best practices basics as well as the format and content flexibility need-ed for ongoing SEO competitiveness is crucial to your website’s ability to be found by the right people (your targets) using search to initiate, research and fulfill their products and services needs.

The entire practice of SEO is always evolving. What once was a most effec-tive method in one time period may be saturated and even a detriment in the next. If your website is not designed to keep up, your SEO results won’t. How-ever, it is quite possible to ‘SEO to death’ your Web content. This is where the bal-ance with design for business results is needed.

n People: Your Web visitors are not just your target prospective customers. They can be existing customers, pro-spective employees or influencers. Each needs to receive a favorable experience. The look and feel of your site, its con-tent and the delivery of your corporate message needs to resonate meaningfully with your primary targets and to your secondary and other online audiences. Achieving this is a hallmark of truly art-ful Web design.

Then you need to connect the navi-gation and usability of your website to address these audiences and create momentum toward your desired end re-sult (the lead or sale). I call this aspect, ‘design for the directed path,’ which is orchestrating website elements and con-tent that facilitates the journey of the educational process to the sale. Great Web design educates people through content that eliminates barriers and mo-tivates them to call you, submit a lead form or purchase online.

When you have addressed the needs, expectations and optimized the experi-ence for each of these audiences in your website design, your business is primed to reap online results and best your competition. Thus, great business Web design = leads and sales. <<

For a snapshot of Bayshore Solutions Web marketing methodology, click to: www.BayshoreSolutions.com/method.

KEVIN HOURIGAN is the president and CEO of Bayshore Solutions. Reach him at (877) 535-4578 or www.BayshoreSolutions.com.

Kevin HouriganPresident and CEO Bayshore Solutions