As a company founder, your hands are doubtless full (and your mind, too!). Your day-to-day work as an entrepreneur keeps you busy yourself with planning, finances, infrastructure, official bodies and admin, often leaving little time to design your website. However, a website must always be up-to-date and must grow with the company.
Where Should You Start With Your Own Website?
First off, you should try to put yourself in potential users’ shoes. It’s not enough to look at similar websites and those of your competitors, use them as a guide to put your company’s information and content online, then keep your fingers crossed.
This means it is important to know what your target group is from the off, and what form of content they consume online. This already gives you a lot of insight into whether you will need to focus on videos, images, text or other formats. The basic principle is that you need to be as transparent as possible when selling a product or service. You shoulshow what lies behind it, what kinds of materials and people are involved, and what the creative process looks like in broad terms.
Whether you design the website yourself or choose to work with an agency is completely dependent on the time, skills and budget you have at your disposal. You should also bear in mind that your website will need to be updated and added to on an ongoing basis so it can grow with the company. As a result, it is critically important that you learn about the various systems and tools from the off, so you can pick the right solution from the start.
What Makes A Website Successful?
Now that you are very well acquainted with your target group, you know what kind of content you need to appeal to potentialnew customers. But there are a few key tips for designing your content.
Create Trust
You need to win users’ trust, especially if you’re selling your own products and services on your website. You need to actively invest in building up that trust. For example, you could present your team, or yourself, in a truly authentic way so people can see behind the curtain. Are you a member of any associations, or are you involved in any partnerships that inspire trust? Or has there been any media coverage of your company? If so, integrate these logos and pieces of content into your website. You can also publish customer reviews on your website to further shore up this foundation of trust.
Clear Messages
What is the key message you want to put across to users? Think about the messages you want to put across to your target group, and how you can word these in a clear, snappy way to grab their attention. Then position these messages carefully at sensible points.
Numbers and Facts
If you communicate advantages, benefits and figures on your website, you should support them with sources or facts. People visiting your website for the first time will tend to take a sceptical view. So, to appear credible towards your users, you need to make more of an investment into building up trust: show results or processes so people can familiarise themselves with them.
Storytelling
If you want to turn visitors into potential new customers, you need to reach people on an emotional level, taking into account the tips we’ve mentioned. The art lies in winning someone over in as little time as possible. The design and all the content therefore need to be completely tailored to your target group. You can inspire and win over customerswith a story that puts a person or their problem in the foreground and then presents your solution to the problem, with your business as the saviour of the day.
As a young company, you have the advantage of being able to follow new, innovative approaches when creating content. Make the most of this advantage, something that large, established companies don’t have, for your online presence and analyse it so you can use new methods and take new steps with agility.You must also respect all the legal rules applying to websites. It’s wise to seek legal advice in thisregard, to ensure you are well-protected by your T&Cs, privacy policy and legal notice.
