MSK Design are a Firm of Architects based in North London. They undertake a number of projects from Domestic loft conversions and extensions, house builds and commercial projects. They came to us wanting a new fresh website that helped to depict their work accurately. As an Architectural firm, images were incredibly important and are very much a main feature of the website.

Still in its early days the aim is to continue to grow the site to show off the quality and scope of work carried out by MSK Design. We will also be working with them in helping them market their business on the internet though search marketing and social media funnels.

The brief design wise was to come up with a clean and simple concept, a site that was easy to navigate with rotating banner  images on every page with content to complement and explain the process behind the beautiful designs that MSK Design have produced for their clients.

MSK Design work with their clients to not only come up with something that looks good, but also results that fit in with the clients lifestyle requirements and usage of each room. After all, there’s no point having a great looking home if the space and layout doesn’t work for you on a practical basis.

The website was very much the same, we wanted to come up with something that looked great but with the user in mind. Many Architects websites are very images focussed but sometimes this can make it difficult for visitors to the website to get to the imformation that they want. We wanted to balance out imagery with a site that works well for customers and potential customers.

As always we appreciate your feedback on our website designs so please do let us know what you think in the comments section of this blog.

Often people rush straight into the design stage of website development without actually really working out their objectives for the site. You really need to start with an online marketing strategy before you do anything else. Once you have this in place design needs to start with your landing pages, these are those pages that people will ‘land’ on when they visit your website. Usually the most visited page will be your home page although if you have a PPC campaign running or are targeting specific keywords in your search marketing strategy then this may include other pages on your site.

These are the most important pages to design in the right way, if you don’t then people won’t hang around and you will have missed out on the opportunity of converting that visitor into a lead for your business. So where to start, well you need to consider the following:

1. What content needs to be on your landing page?

You want your most critical information to be on your landing page, the things that will help someone make a decision about whether they are in the right place and what they need to do next. It needs to be instantly recognisable that you do what the visitor is looking for. You must have your phone/email on your page and also your call to actions, any sign up opportunity whether it’s to download an e-book or subscribe to your newsletter. Anything else can be left for other pages, things like Company information and history just shouldn’t take centre stage.

2. Who is gooing to land on your page?

You may have different types of visitor come to your website, for example clients or prospects, people looking to work for you, the media and many more. Think about the types of people that are likely to visit, who are your most critical visitors and design your landing page with those people in mind. If you have more than one group that fall into this category then think about setting up different landing pages for each group.

3. What do you want people to do

What action do you want visitors to take when they visit your website? Your design should help them to be able to take that action easily and quickly, make sure these call to actions stand out and that you keep your page clean and simple to avoid the eye being distracted away from this more important action.

If you have thought about these things thoroughly then you are ready to start on your website landing page design.

Because I focus so much on what you do when you have a website, it is easy for people to forget that we are a full service agency based in Essex which means that we do everything.  From initial design through to analytics and reporting and everything in between, I ofen get asked what makes us different from everyone else and I think the simplist way to answer this is that we look at it from a marketing point of view.  We use great design and the latest technology to achieve results for our clients and those results come from marketing their business to the right people in the right way.

It is all very well having website designers put together a beautiful site but what is the point if it doesn’t generate any business for you.  Of course we have this capability and it is very important but we really see ourselves as extension of our clients business, we become their online marketing department, helping bring their business goals to fruition.

So next time you are searching for an Essex based website designer think about what you really want, there are so many fantastic designers out there that simply have no idea how to market a business or how to build a site that is aimed at converting visitors into new customers and this is exactly the thing that we base our whole business on.

So apologies for taking up space in my blog to talk about our business, I don’t do it very often, but every now and again I just feel like I need to clarify a few things.  I have a bit of a mission to educate businesses about online marketing and I admit I get a little too passionate about it. And remember please, we are not just Essex based website designers but a whole lot more too.

Landing pages are exactly that, they are the pages that people first get to (land on) when they visit your website.  When designing a website these are the most important pages to consider, you have just seconds to convince someone that they are in the right place and that it is easy for them to find what they are looking for.  The first thing I would mention is that it is really important that you think about your business and choose images and an overall design that represents it properly.  I have seen so many websites where there homepage has some random image on it and therefore it takes that little bit longer to try and determine whether this is indeed a website that can help fulfill my individual need.

Layout

The layout of your landing pages is incredibly important, there have been lots of studies about how people read webpages and where certain elements should be placed.  As a general guide, you contact details should be top right, your logo top left and an easily visible menu which is either towards the top of the page or on the left hand side.  People read in a kind of F shape so you need to ensure that your most important information is here.  Oh, don’t waste valuable space talking about how lovely it is for them to have visited your website and then spouting off a story about the history of your company, people don’t care.

Colours

Don’t use too many, ensure that what you do have fits in with your overall brand and don’t use red or black unless you are involed in cars, fashion or music.  It just doesn’t work.  Make sure that people can easily read the text you have on the page, try to avoid white writing on a dark background as firstly it’s more difficult to read and secondly if someone wants to copy and paste some of your text for future reference then they won’t be able to.

Words

Write you web copy with search engines in mind, get to the crux of what your business can do to help solve someones problem.  Don’t use too many or too few words, includes links to other relvant pages in appropriate so that people can navigate easily.  Make sure your menu titles make sense to people, try and stay away from jargon.  You need to approach this with very easy to understand English and remember that most of the people visiting the site won’t necessarily know much about the industry you are in so use words that people will understand.

Images

Images are great, but referring back to an earlier point about where to put certain information, don’t take up half of the page with a massive banner, people rarely scroll down below the fold of the page and you are likely to lose people.  Also, don’t use too many images and those that you do use, ensure they are small in file size so that it doesn’t take days for the page to load as people will just leave the website and it will have an impact on your search engine rankings.

Call to Actions

People want a simple life, make your call to actions clear and concise so that it is obvious at to what action people need to do next, have them situated in the most viewed part of the page (yes, it’s that f shape again), the easier your make it for people to take action, the more likely they will and therefore the more leads you will get.  Simple heh!

Measurement

I bang on about it all the time, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to measure what you do.  Try testing two different landing pages to see which one works best (A/B Testing) then continue to tweak and change to continually improve.

Most of all, remember that this is all about the people that visit your website and not about you, tell people what they want to know, help them find what they are looking for and make it easy for them to purchase, call, email etc..  If you take these steps then you will go a long way towards improving your conversion rates.

Your homepage is most likely the first page that people will visit, so when designing a home page for a website it’s important to follow some tried and tested methods in terms of layout.  Here are some tips for where certain elements should be placed on the page:

Your contact details should be at the top of the page and clearly visible, usually located top right in the header, if you hide your contact details away then less people will contact you, it’s that simple.

In keeping with your branding, make sure your logo is on display, if you don’t have one then you should consider getting a logo professionally designed.  It is likely that it will be with you for a long time.

Ensure you have a menu which is either top or LH side, your menu needs to have clear wording so people understand where they need to go and keep it simple, don’t overcrowd it with too many options.

Banners can create a good visual effect; they can give a business the opportunity to display images and information about their business in an effective way.  This can be either static or in slideshow format, but don’t go down the route of using flash.  You don’t have to have a banner but it is a very simple way of making your homepage visually engaging.

Make sure you have your most important information at the beginning of your text, so many are about welcoming people to their website and offering up company information.  Sorry to damage your ego here but people really don’t care; they just want to be able to quickly make a decision about whether this website provides the information/products/services that they were looking for.

Lastly as an overall tip, make sure that your homepage is consistent with the rest of the website, keep it clean and simple and don’t get so hung up on the design elements that you lose the focus of what you are trying to achieve

The internet holds such a wide range of opportunities and yet it can be overwhelming for some, too much choice can send our brains racing with information overload.  There are so many ways in which online marketing can benefit a business that it really requires one to work they way through the minefield and make the most of what is a available to them.

Having a website it something that most businesses see as a necessity now, but there are so many poorly designed sites out there.  It’s an area that tends to lack investment and proper thought with many companies basing their site on what they want to tell people rather than what people actually want to know.

Some things to avoid when designing a website

One of the mistakes that amateurs make in the field of website design, is cross browser testings.  Not everybody uses Internet Explorer and you need to ensure that your website appears correctly in all of the most popular browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome).

Designing a simple site is also important, a cluttered design with too much going on will confuse the visitor and damage their experience.  If someone can’t find what they want almost immediately then they will simply look elsewhere.

Keep everything consistent, make sure you use the same font and colours throughout and that the whole site looks unified.  By doing so you will help other factors that search engines take into account such as website loading speeds, increased usability which can create a much more popular site will also in turn help your search engine results.

How to Engage a visitor

The layout and ease of use is vital, but when designing a website it is important to get the balance right between this and having a great design too.  One of the ways you can help to engage visitors when they visit is giving them a more interactive experience, things like video and allowing blog comments will help to keep people on the website in the first place.

So in summary, it’s important to make sure your website looks right and creates the right image for your business, but it also needs to be easy to use in all browsers and encourage visitors to your website to stay there a bit longer and interact with your business.  There is of course a lot more to it that discussed here, but if you keep to these simple rules then you can’t go too far wrong when designing a website.

This week we launched our newest site  http://www.radiatorvalvesonline.com this was a website design and development of an existing e-commerce site.  Up until now orders had been processed all via Paypal only and why this was fine they wanted to implement a payment gateway and have a more professional website.

We came up with two initial designs which were then tweaked to come up with the finished product.  We then built the site, we chose prestashop for the e-commerce element of the website and integrated the payment gateway so the website now accepts visa and mastercard payments as well as paypal.

The range of products on offer was also expanded and this is something that is planned to continue and so the requirement was for a solution that allowed this easily alongside visibility of orders placed, email notification and analytics.

The website predominantly sells automatic radiator valves which are easily fitted onto a radiator to alleviate the need to manually bleed.  As a result of them keeping the air at bay, the idea is that the radiators will be more efficient, remain hot to the top and ultimately save you money on your heating bill.  The most popular two products are the HV30C valve which fits modern radiators and the micro which fits older style radiators.  The new range includes good value designer radiators but the company are always looking our for new suppliers, so feel free to get in touch if you have something that you think would complement the current range.

Having a good looking website is great, we all want that.  But more importantly most of us want a website that will turn visitors into our future customers.  In the same way a retail shop is laid out to encourage people to spend the most amount of money, a website needs to do the same.  We talk a lot about how to increase traffic to your website, but there is no point having lots of traffic which doesn’t actually do the things that you want them to do, whether that is picking up the phone, emailing, buying a product etc..

You need to encourange your visitors to make a positive buying decision and they will only do this if they have a good experience when using your website.  To do this you need to ensure that your website is laid out in a certain way, one which web users are familiar with and one that helps them to navigate around the site and find information easily.  If you make things too difficult for people, they will simply spend their money with someone else.

Things to consider:

• Why are people visiting your website
• Does your website design tell people what you do instantly
• What do you want them to do
• How easy is it to get from one page to another
• Is there enough information about your products and services
• Do you use different media such as images and video
• Where are your call to actions
• Where on the page is the content place

So you see, it’s really not all about having a good looking website design, it’s a lot more complicated than that.  Find out more about website design