3 pillars of a strong website.

Whether you’re offering property services, selling dog toys or running festivals, your website is a fundamental part of your business. It’s the place where everyone goes to learn more about your brand, what you offer and make purchases or book appointments. If you’re wondering how to maximise your online space, then read on to discover the 3 pillars of a strong website that delivers results.

Why are websites so important?

Before we go any further, it’s important that we fully understand exactly why a website is so important. At its core, your website contains all the information about your business and the products or services you sell. But it’s so much more than just that! Here’s how a powerful website can help your business.

• Credibility

Without a website, it can be hard for customers to find information about you, ultimately causing them to question your legitimacy. A website makes your business legitimate, reassuring potential customers that you are in fact a real business they can trust.

• Branding

If your online home is used correctly, it can become a powerful tool in terms of building a strong brand and raising brand awareness. With clear information about your values and what you offer, you can let people know exactly why they should choose you over a competitor.

• Traffic & leads

When people have questions, they turn to Google. By having a website, you can increase your visibility thereby improving your chances of finding new customers and quality leads. With all your information in one place, you make it easier for people to get in touch and convert.

• Business growth

Websites are central to digital marketing strategies, linking up to all your emails, PPC ads and social media accounts, as well as making use of additional SEO and content strategies. To make use of all these channels, you need an online home where you can direct your traffic.

The 3 pillars of a strong website

Now we know why a website is so important, here are the 3 fundamentals to bear in mind that will help you build a powerful website and unlock the full potential of your online home.

1. User experience (UX) design

When it comes to building a website, the first thing you need to consider is usability. UX design is essentially the blueprint of your online home, outlining how customers will move around your website and meet their expectations. This involves researching your users’ needs, pain points and goals.

The idea is to make sure your visitors have everything they need at each step of their journey through your website, ultimately guiding them further down the sales funnel. This ensures that your website has all the functionalities your customers need in a way that’s enjoyable to use from start to finish.

UX design includes everything from the size and location of CTAs and menus to the checkout process, number of fields in your forms and mobile friendliness. Since it’s all about delivering a positive user experience, it can also help with ranking by improving page load speeds and creating logical site architecture.

This involves creating a wireframe, which maps out the blueprint of your website. It shows all the main features and how visitors will navigate between pages. UX design aims to deliver a great experience that guides visitors towards their goals. This will ultimately impact your bottom line, and by considering this at the start of your website build, you can create a strong foundation for the rest of your website.

Find out more about the importance of user experience.

2. User Interface (UI) Design

Once you have the foundations in place, you need to make your website visually engaging. It’s well known that people are quick to make judgements based on visuals alone, with research showing it can take as little as 0.05 seconds to form an opinion of your website. Other studies have also revealed how different designs can affect credibility and impact the way people recall websites after just 5 seconds of exposure.

On the surface, UI design covers all the visuals including colour palette, typography, illustrations, photography, animations and spacing. On a deeper level, it also encompasses interactive elements such as what happens when you click a button or logo, and navigation like information architecture, placement of CTAs and menu styles.

Essentially, UX design focuses on the fundamental architecture of your website while UI design is all about the overall look of your website, how the interface behaves and how people interact with it. UI designers need to make sure that everything looks great, engages the user and aligns with your brand.

3. Content Management System (CMS)

The final stage of building a strong website is the content management system (CMS), a software application that gives you full control over your website without having to learn how to code. This makes it super simple to keep your website updated, so you can take charge of your online home and ensure it has everything your visitors need.

Without a CMS system, you’ll need to write the site from scratch using HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to code everything from images and text to menus and search bars. Once the basic structure is in place, you add stylistic elements like colours using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and functionality with Javascript.

Here’s an example of what this looks like:

This then gets uploaded to your server and will need to be downloaded and changed by hand each time you want to make changes.

On the other hand, a CMS system is a user-friendly application that lets you edit the website with the click of a button. When creating a blog post, you can add headings, text, images and spacers by simply typing, dragging and dropping. Click save, and your new post will be automatically uploaded to the website.

The CMS creates the code in the background to reflect the changes you make, giving you a simple interface that offers full control over your website. With a CMS in place, you can make easy work of keeping your website updated so that it continues to work for you and your visitors without having to rely on developers.

Build a strong website that performs

UX and UI work together to deliver a fantastic experience with every interaction, while the right CMS will help keep your website updated and meeting visitor expectations. By considering UX, UI and CMS at the start of your build, you can create solid foundations for a strong website built to perform.

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