There are no cheat codes or short cuts for building a great business reputation. Alongside a strong foundation of delivering consistency and continuity with your service and standards, great custom web design - when planned and implemented properly - can provide a welcome boost to building trust among your audience. Understanding your customer behaviours is key. From here, you can build your design and business strategies around your customers and organically encourage the growth of your reputation from the ground up.
Wondering where to start? We’ve put together some initial thoughts of what to include when planning your custom web design with reputation in mind. As always, there is no prescriptive answer in web design, but the below can act as a starting point for developing your ideas around your individual business model.
Blogging: Adding a blog feature to your custom website allows you to discuss topics of expertise or interest in greater detail than standard website copy would allow for. You can add a personality to your brand, and people can look to your blog for advice and knowledge. Blogging is also a great way to show that your business is in tune with current trends and topics - evolving with the times and being run by real people. These are qualities that help to build trust and reliability.
Digestible content: The content on your custom web pages themselves needs to be easy to understand. Use language and images that demonstrate a specialism within your industry, but still allow for the majority of users to access and benefit from the information housed on your website.
Navigation: Your custom website should be easy to navigate and clearly logical in the layout of your sitemap. Users should be able to locate the information they are looking for without running into problems - a great way to trial your layout and navigation is with beta testing before your custom website goes live.
Clean design: Adopting a clean and streamlined design can directly assist you in achieving the ease of navigation and readability mentioned above. Your audience shouldn’t struggle to access your content because of your design, colour palette, or content placement. Calls to action should be easily visible to help signpost users around your website - help to lead your audience through to the action you want them to take, whether that be getting in touch, purchasing a product, or booking a service.
Easily accessible: Building your custom website so that users don’t have to download content or plug-ins is a big plus - as is designing your site to be responsive to different screen sizes and devices. By making your business’s online presence as easily located, accessed, and browsed as possible, you can build up a great reputation for offering a straight forward customer journey.
These are just a few of many ways that great custom web design can help to influence and build a great reputation for your business. Think carefully during the design and development stages of your project about how core details and additional features can be incorporated to help you to grow your reputation online.
Above all, remember to deliver on consistency as a positive reputation can be damaged very easily. If you can commit to delivering a high standard of customer journey at all times - your great reputation will become invaluable to your business’s growth and success.
For advice about building a great business reputation through your business’s custom web design, contact the Kartogram team today. Our friendly and experienced designers and developers can help you to plan your next project with reputation in mind - supporting you to get things right, right from the start. Get in touch and let’s get talking.