Our websites our a key way to keep customers thinking about our brand, or to draw in new customers. Building our digital representation in a smart way can ensure that visitors will want to keep coming back again and again, which should always be our goal. More visitors means more cash-flow, after all. In this post, we’ll be looking at the top ways you can build a website to keep customers interested.

Make a Strong First Impression

Whenever someone visits a website, the first minute is oftentimes the most important time in their visit. Just as the first impression you give in a meeting or interview can dictate success, so too can a website’s first impression. The homepage that your site opens on needs to build interest in a visitor and invite them to explore further. If you fail to bring a visitor deeper into your site on their first visit, then there’s no way you’ll keep them as a recurring visitor to your site.

There are plenty of great ways to build a homepage, but a few key points will always be important to your homepage’s success. First, using large and interesting images will draw a visitor’s eyes and spark their interest. Second, including relevant and engrossing text can start to build a rapport with the audience. And finally, making your brand the guiding force behind all of your content will help the customer to understand your business immediately.

Welcome Them to Your Brand

Sure, we want our brand to be immediately apparent in our site, but how do we make sure our identity is consistent throughout the website? Not every page should be built like the homepage of a site, but the same philosophy and decision-making should be used. Images need to be selected that have a color scheme that is works well with your brand’s logo. Written content should always have a tone and style that matches your brand’s personality. Whenever you’re thinking about something to add to a page, ask yourself how it reflects on your business, and how you want your business to be portrayed. Questioning and rethinking design aspects of your site may sound fruitless, but in fact the opposite is true. Every decision, even a seemingly small one, helps to build your personality and your company, and its important to pay your due diligence when building your website.

Keeping your brand as a central focus for your site will pay dividends in the long run. Your logo, color scheme, and written content will all work together to build a memorable experience for your visitor, and can help keep your business lodged in their minds. Just like your marketing campaigns can keep your brand in a customer’s mind, a website can easily accomplish the same, as long as you focus your efforts on building a website that represents you well.

Focus on Positive Imagery and Content

The images you use on your website can actually have a massive impact on a customer’s impression of you. Pictures are able to make customers feel emotions and build interest with minimal effort, making them extremely effective for any marketing or web design purposes. Since we are building our businesses and want customers to be enthusiastic about our brands and to keep coming back, we want to use images that inspire this type of behavior. Oftentimes, the most successful images for this are ones that have brighter colors (unless your logo and overall color scheme doesn’t work with this), smiling customers, or impressive images of your products. When selecting a picture you want on a web-page, think about what emotion it makes you feel, and how this relates to what emotion you want a customer to feel. Thinking like a customer will always prove to be one of the most effective decision-making strategies you can use.

Positive content can continue to bring in customers over time if you present it in the right manner. A blog is a brilliant strategy for bringing customers back for more. Releasing content that represents your brand and goods on a consistent basis will help to build an audience that wants to return to your site time and time again for more fresh content.

Show Off Your Products/Services

Your business is mainly built upon the success of your products or services. Yes, every aspect of a business is important, from marketing to management, but the final goods you deliver to a customer will be the catalyst of your success. For this reason, we want our websites to portray our goods in a very positive light, as well as giving them to opportunity to purchase or learn about them.

We referenced earlier that using images of your products can be a great way to build interest in your website, but the benefits go even further. Not only can a great picture excite a visitor, but it can also work as an easy and personal form of marketing. Since its your website, the entire space can be considered as advertising space for you and your brand. Don’t oversell your goods to customers, but help them to understand your company better so they’ll be willing to make a purchase. This can be accomplished by using testimonials about your goods, or by featuring content that shows off your products at their very best.

Ensure It Is Easy to Navigate Your Site and Make a Purchase

Now that we’ve catered our content towards our market effectively, we need to make sure they can use our site to its fullest extent. A major roadblock that many websites come across is getting customers off of the first page and into the meat of our site and business. Nobody visits a website wanting to hunt for the next page. Making your site logical to go through and making it obvious how to do so is key to success.

To make sure a customer can make it through your site easily, focusing on infrastructure is huge. Think about menus and links, and where to place them in relation to images and content. Oftentimes the most successful interfaces focus heavily on drop-down menus or sidebars. Both of these options can be easily found by a visitor while remaining unobtrusive.

In addition to these navigation styles, there’s another key section of your website that needs to be easy to reach, and preferably has many different links to it: the final point of sale. Whether your company sells products through an online marketplace or offers localized services, a web-page can make a sale just as effectively as a physical storefront if its build right. Whether you make a sale online by having a customer add items to their cart or contact your business to schedule an appointment, this is the place where your site makes direct money from your customer. For that reason, we want a customer to be able to access this final point of sale from anywhere on your site. Take our homepage for example. We have 4 separate places to Start A Project with us. This ensures that no matter where you’ve scrolled to our what information you’re looking for, you’ll be invited to work closer with our company and start your own web design project. Once a customer has started their patronage with our company, our website will continue to be in their mind, and they’ll continue to visit our page for more information and updates over time. Building your website in this manner, or working alongside us and building a project with our help, can ensure that your site will always have customers that want to keep coming back.