Website Design

A website that supports your company’s sales and marketing objectives must attract relevant visitors and convert those visitors to prospects, buyers or partners as appropriate.

Attract Website Visitors
There’s not much point to having a great website for your business if nobody sees it. It turns out that the ability for new visitors to find your site has a lot to do with the way the site is written and laid out.

A website that provides valuable information in a user-friendly manner will generally attract inbound referrals from other websites. Just as referrals are good for business in the physical world, they act as business drivers on the Internet.

A well-written, information-rich site will also generally rank better in search engine results pages, which will refer additional visitors. This process can be enhanced through Search Engine Optimization.

There are other ways to drive relevant visitor traffic to your site, as described in our section on Website Promotion.

Convert Visitors to Buyers
To convert visitors to buyers, your site must impress visitors in the first few seconds of their arrival, and then guide each desired audience through the process you have designed for them. The site must look professional and present a straightforward way for people to find what they are looking for. The first goal should be to provide a “positive user experience” to your site’s visitors.

Some businesses, particularly in the retail space, lend themselves to closing the sale at the time of the initial visit. Most Business-to-Business companies, however, must first inform the prospect and develop a relationship based on trust. The actual sale is made days, weeks, or even months later.

In either case, the goal should be to take the relationship between the visitor and the website owner to another level. Perhaps we can persuade the visitor to volunteer their email address and agree to receive periodic emails from us. Perhaps we can get them to complete a survey with their contact information and preferences.

Seems straightforward, but it’s amazing how many websites get it wrong. Have you ever looked for a product, found a site that seems to sell it, but been unable to consummate the deal? Maybe the problem is blindingly obvious – they’ve hidden the order form. Sometimes it’s more subtle – they ask you to commit to payment in full before you know the shipping and handling charges. Click! Off you go to the next site.

It’s also amazing how many website design companies there are out there, vying for your business. How do you pick one?

Isn’t Market-Vantage just another website design company?
We get asked this question a lot. Yes, we design and overhaul websites. But creating an effective Internet marketing presence takes a lot more than basic website design.

Many of our clients already have an in-house web designer or a web design firm they are comfortable working with. In that case, we become part of the team, providing expertise in terms of strategy, messaging, search engine optimization or marketing – in short, we fill in the missing pieces.

There are three general disciplines required to develop a successful website that increases your business:

• Graphics – the site must be visually appealing, logically laid out, and easy to navigate. Most professional web design firms are strong in this area.
  
• Engineering – The site must be robust and resistant to hacking. It must be designed to grow and change as your business changes. Your site should be interactive, accepting inquiries or subscriptions to providing a secure portal for your customers. Most professional web design firms are better at graphics than engineering. Those that excel in engineering rarely provide good graphic art. Very few firms are good at both disciplines.
  
• Copy – Study after study has shown that well-written copy on your website is the single most important factor in converting visitors to prospects and buyers. Well-written copy is also the single most important driver to obtaining high search engine rankings organically, which will drive traffic to your site. Some professional web designers are, to put it politely, not the best copy writers. Even professional copy writers sometimes struggle with the unique writing style of the web.

Market-Vantage brings excellence in all of these disciplines to bear on your specific business situation, and we add our years of experience and best practices of Internet marketing to the mix. We are business leaders and experienced marketers first, so we understand that your website only makes sense if it helps your company generate a profit.

That’s what makes us different!