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7 Design Elements Every Company Website Must Have

The website is a company’s biggest and typically the most expensive marketing asset they have. If designed correctly your website will generate leads for your business by engaging visitors and getting them to take action to become a customer. There are certain design elements every company website must have in order for it to work hard to get you, customers.

There are 7 design elements every company website must have in order to convert visitors into leads

  1. In Context Images
  2. A Blog
  3. Call to Action
  4. Email Sign Up Form
  5. 3 Step Process for how to work with you
  6. Stakes and Benefit statements
  7. Products and Service On The Home Page

We talk about these as design elements but they are not to make the site pretty they are to make the visitors take action and choose you. Let’s take a deeper dive into each one of these with examples of how they can generate leads for your business.

In Context Images

In Context, Images are images that visually represent the message you are conveying with the copy on the website. The most important picture to get right is the Hero image. Visitors’ eyes take in images and what they convey much faster than they can read and comprehend the copy, even when it is short and to the point.

For example, if you are a dog grooming company, having a picture of a happy dog looking wonderful at the end of the grooming process in a clean environment will convey the concept of a Doggy Spa Treatment faster than the words will.

Don’t waste that first image space with a picture of your team or your building. Save those pictures for the about us page. Once people have decided that your products or services are right for them, the next place they will visit is the about us page to learn more about you.

If you don’t have any high-quality images of your own, stock photography is a great option. We like to use Deposit Photo for stock photography. You can get images for a dollar apiece or less and there is a wide variety of photographs. They also have vectors and stock videos.

A Blog

There are several benefits to having a small business website blog. Blog articles are the best way to increase website traffic through organic search rankings.

  • It is easier to create multiple long-tail keywords with a blog article topic
  • Snippets from blog articles are the primary source that Google uses for Google Answer Targets
  • Regularly posting blog articles keeps your site current. Google indexes current content and sites higher.
Rank Math

When we took over blog writing and SEO for a physical therapist office website we saw a 50% increase in traffic after 3 months and the number of keyword variations (the number of different keywords we hit for) doubled and branched out to more of the service language and not just the company name. As a result of all this traffic, the number of calls and appointments scheduled doubled over the 1st year based on organic search alone.

We used RankMath, a WordPress plugin, to optimize the content to achieve these results.

Blogs benefit humans too. Blog articles allow you to help and educate people who are searching for answers to problems and questions they have. 76% of buyers make their final decision based on who provided them the content that educated them. People are also spending more time doing research before they buy (Weidert Group).

Blog articles are the best way to get people in the research phase of the buying process. If they read your article find it helpful and in line with their thought process they will click through to the main part of your website to understand what you are offering.

Call To Action

As a general rule of user experience on a website, you want to have multiple calls to action. A person will scroll past until they find content that compels them to purchase then they will look for the closest option on the page to help them purchase what they are looking for.

Don’t make them work hard to find a way to engage with you. Having multiple primary and secondary call to action on a website increases sales by 20%. It’s about convenience and ease of use. Here are the best places to put your primary call to action I.E. buying boxes

  • Upper right-hand corner buttons
  • Hero Image overlay
  • Just underneath the hero image
  • Middle of the page
  • Footer

Email Sign Up Form

Asking people to sign up for your newsletter or to get a high-value download that they need as part of their buying research is a secondary call to action and these are just as valuable as a primary call to action.

Secondary calls to action are important for staying in front of people who are not ready to purchase yet. These types of calls to action are signing up for a newsletter or following you on social media. Once they have joined one of your lists you can then push content to them so that your name and brand come to mind when they are ready to buy.

Using embedded newsletter forms on your website is a great way to get people to sign up for your list. Another great way is using a chatbot they can engage with to answer questions and get them to sign up for your newsletter list. We recommend the Tidio Chatbot as it has multiple features including live chat and newsletter signup workflows.

3 Step Process of How Easy It Is To Work With You

People want to know before they buy how easy it will be to work with a company or use a product. Use this as a way to sell your product or service by telling them how easy it is to work with you. People can only remember 3 to 4 things in a group anymore and it gets confusing (PNAS). Simplifying your process to three steps for the client makes it more likely they will want to work with you because it seems simple. It should be simple for them even if you have more than 3 steps to make it happen.

Here is how we like to break down the steps for the potential customers

Step 1 – Outreach – make an appointment, fill out a form

Step 2 – How you guide them through the process of starting with you and how you interact with them along the way

Step 3 – Inspirational statement around project completion. Celebrate the project and how satisfied the customer is.

The language you use will be specific to your offerings and the customer you are trying to attract but this is the formula you should follow. Only go to a 4th step if you need to and never go beyond that as you could be perceived as difficult to work with.

Stakes and Benefits Of Working With You

Share 3 – 5 benefits that the person will get by working with you. You can use these as a way to differentiate yourself from competitors in what you offer. This is extremely beneficial if they are unsure if what you are offering is necessary or worth the price of the offering.

These benefits should quantify the value of the purchase emotionally and socially not necessarily financially. If you solve their emotional problems then the cost will seem worth it. Emotional problems are internal problems that are more important to a person than the external problem which is the need.

Here is an example. External Problem – I need to buy shoes to match the outfit I am wearing to make my presentation to the board of directors. Internal/emotional problem – I need to dress so that the board of directors takes me seriously while I am presenting. If your product language speaks to the internal/emotional problem the sale will be easier regardless of the price.

Donald Miller Story Brand

What is at stake if they do not purchase from you is just as important as the benefits. Sharing with them what they could lose can also be a motivating factor in making final decisions. Keep the content light in this area, you may only need to share one or two things. You want to plant the seed of what to look out for if they chose to go with a competitor.

The stakes and benefits concept is expanded upon in Donald Millers Story Brand Book.

Products | Services On The Home Page

With 63% (Research.com) of visitors using mobile phones to look at websites, a best practice in mobile-first design is to create a place to describe and link to your product or service pages in your home page content, not just a menu link.

Thumb Friendly Mobile Website Design

The hamburger menu is typically not in a thumb-friendly place for most users. By placing titles with images in the center well section of your page that links to your product or service pages you increase the likely hood of a visitor taking more time to look at the details on those pages.

Implementing Design Elements Every Company Website Must Have

To implement these 7 design elements every company website should use a platform that allows for a custom website design so that you can implement them in a way that works for your brand’s offerings.

If you are a service-based business we recommend using WordPress with a custom website template builder like Elementor or Divi. We use both of these tools to implement all of these elements.

I hope you found this article helpful in securing your business so you can stay focused on your growth goal which always includes marketing. You can get more website design ideas in our article Top 7 Website Design Ideas For Small Business In 2022. Feel free to reach out via chat if you have any questions. We are always happy to answer questions. If you want our content delivered to your inbox Sign up for our newsletter. You get great content and exclusive offers by being a member.

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