Top Web Design Tips for Startups Trying to Grow

Web Design & Development
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Travis McAshan
Published Nov 2020
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Perfecting your website can be a daunting task, especially when you are knee deep in trying to grow your startup. We love startups at GLIDE (who doesn’t like good company?), so we want to help by giving you a couple of pointers to get your website design on the forward track. 

Plan Your Strategy

In my opinion, passion is one of the top features that highlights entrepreneurs. It is an attribute that fuels their business journey over the course of many years. Before plunging into the actual design of your startup website, you must first create a strategy. Make sure you are doing things right from the start, as skipping this step can lead to burning your time, circling back over and over. Ask yourself good questions. You can do this by defining the most relevant features of your website needs based on the answers to some overarching questions:

  • What key features do you want to showcase on your website?
  • What is the consistent message you want to convey to your audience?
  • What type of content does your target audience expect to see?
  • Who is your Ideal Customer Profile? See more on ICP’s here.

After you provide thorough, in-depth answers, you will be able to outline a solid strategy for building your website.

planning your website

Keep it Simple

Business Review’s Corporate Executive Board surveyed consumers and marketing experts about 40 different variables that make a consumer “sticky” – meaning they want to follow through with or buy repeatedly from a company. They found that by far the single biggest driver of stickiness was “decision simplicity”, or how easily those customers can gather trustworthy information about your product/service and confidently compare their options. Web design for startups makes no exception. There are many perks of a simple, yet beautiful design for your startup website. The most obvious one is easier readability and overall user experience. When a design is simple, it is also mobile-friendly. If you want to keep your website design simple, you will need to identify the key elements that you want to showcase. A simple design carries a concise, but strong message, which makes your startup visible. Supplying a clean and simple, yet beautiful design and a familiar layout for your website, will ultimately drive more repeat visitors. Another way you can ensure a simple design is to stick to one primary and secondary color, as opposed to multiple primary or secondary colors, and so on. The colors you choose should enhance and support the brand message you are projecting.

Sprinkle In Clear, Compelling Calls To Action

Whether it’s a Submit button, Buy button, Subscribe button, Download, etc. make sure that your CTA is easy to locate and well known on the page. You want these sprinkled throughout the website for a better actionable experience. Create your marketing plan and how each element will be implemented up front to figure out how your website best figures into your plan in the first place. There are specific services or products that you are trying to push, so make sure to have a clear end goal for your site to leverage how you want your customers to use it. 

Engage with Content

It’s important for you to get to know your audience, so you can create relevant, targeted content (like you’re reading now…see what we did there?). Whether you leverage insight, images, videos, or gifs, you need to ensure that the message resonates with your brand. When you include a quality video on your website, the likelihood of engaging your audience goes up exponentially due to customers’ notoriously decreasing attention spans. Back in 2014, it was found that engaging video content helped persuade 73% of website visitors to help buy a service or product. Compare that to the recent results of StacksandStacks.com, who reported that customers were 144% more likely to make a purchase after watching one of their product videos.

Create a Great User Experience

User experience is absolutely one of our top considerations when creating a website that visitors will love and want to come back to time and again. Your potential prospects are often going to use your website as the first place to answer their questions about your company and products/services, so you always need to be sure your website, which is your 24/7 marketing and sales tool, is ready for anything that comes its way. From difficult navigation, to poor content, to slow load times – poor user experience can drive potential customers away from engaging with your company.

ux design

Optimize for Mobile Experience

It’s no surprise that a large portion of people are going to interact with your website from their mobile device; therefore, you must ensure that your website looks great on a desktop as well as any mobile device. You can choose to create a mobile-specific website or use responsive design, depending on what you think is best for your visitor. If you think your visitors will want the same experience on both their desktop or mobile device, go with a mobile-specific site. If you think they will be happy with a streamlined site that has more limited functionality,  but better fits their device, go with responsive design.  

Stay Social

Your startup business should be actively engaging on multiple social media outlets to build brand awareness and drive prospects to your website. Remember, your customers could be engaging your content from multiple places at any moment, for either the reason of learning and growing or potentially purchasing from you in the near future. Impress them!

social media

Ensure that the content on your social media accounts stays in alignment with your overall brand. You definitely don’t want a neglected social media stream to represent what you stand for. Post high-quality, engaging content. Post not only content, but context. Content without context becomes very flat and unengaging. Post frequently. Be sure to respond and engage with your potential customers during the hours your business is open.

Get Started

What did it take to begin your startup…Planning, Energy, Patience, Talent, Focus, and Heart? It will take all of these same qualities to create a great website that will help take your startup to the next level. But you’ve got this, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing what you are already doing. 

On the other hand, doing it right takes a lot of work and can be a lot easier with a helping hand. At Glide, our team has invested over 18 years in helping our thriving customers find success on over 1,000 web projects. If you’re up for it, we’re more than happy to discuss potentially working together and building out your next beautiful project.

To learn more, book a call.

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