The 4 most important aspects for designing and building a website
In this blog post we consider the 4 most important aspects to consider when designing and building a website for your venue styling business.
These are relevant regardless of whether you are doing it all yourself, just part of it, or outsourcing everything to someone else.
And if you are outsourcing the design and/or build of your new site, then you will want to ensure that whoever you use is addressing all of the points below.
Stop the scroll
Your website is your shop window, so it needs to catch the attention of the user from the point at which they first land on your page. Your messaging should be crystal clear from the very start of the customer journey.
There are lots of ways to achieve good design and it will also be important to think about your branding. You will want your customers to recognise that it’s your site from the outset and tie your tone of voice, fonts, imagery and colours into your stationery, social media feeds and other marketing collateral.
Be useable
Your website needs to provide an efficient journey for your customers. It needs to be clear what you’re offering and how they buy from you.
The customer journey through your website is a similar process to designing any sales material. They may want to buy straight away, so it is always good practice to have a “call to action” right at the start.
For those customers who scroll, give them more content so they can get to know, like and trust you. You may wish to consider a biography, testimonials and case studies for example.
Each may be interspersed with a call to action, but keep these simple and clear. It is generally accepted that one call to action per page/section is sufficient.
Be compliant
It is essential to ensure that your website is compliant with current legislation.
If you are running a limited company, then you will need to ensure that certain information such as your company name, registered office address and company number are displayed clearly on your website.
If you are registered for VAT then your VAT number needs to be displayed.
To comply with data protection laws and GDPR you will need to include a cookie policy and privacy policy.
Be found
Finally, you will want your site to be optimised for SEO. If no-one knows your site is there, there is little point in having it in the first place!
SEO is a whole topic in its own right, but we’ve covered some of the highlights below.
- You will need to consider your content and whether it is readable, helpful and relevant to your customer.
- You should use keywords to help the search engines index your site and find the key topics more easily. These should be incorporated throughout your site, including content, meta data and images.
- Your images should be of a high quality and relevant to the content. You should ensure that all of the alt-tags are filled in correctly and that the file size is optimised so that they don’t slow down your website.
- Meta tags and descriptions should be utilised fully – we would go so far as to say that all of the tools available for optimising your SEO should be used. And don’t forget to ensure that “snippets” which are displayed in searches online give the right message to your customers.
- Finally, you will want to maximise the links throughout your website, internal, external and reciprocal links. All of these will give credibility to your site.
Become a successful Venue Stylist
We hope this blog post has been useful to you.
However, if you feel slightly daunted by anything you’ve read in them, then do not worry as we take a deep dive into all of these topics in our Training & Mentoring programme! A programme dedicated to helping you make the right decisions when setting up, running and delivering your venue styling business.
Liz & Doug are a husband and wife team who have been running successful wedding and event related businesses for 28 years, most notably Stressfree – The Venue Transformers, one of the UK’s first venue styling companies. From working for big companies as consultants in the 1980 and 1990s, they went solo in 1995 and now believe that with the right know-how and support, anyone with the right attributes can become a successful venue stylist!
And if you’d like some one-on-one assistance, our Stressfree Business Audit is just one of the other ways in which we can help you.
The contents of this blog are for general information purposes only. You may wish to seek professional advice in relation to specific circumstances.