(2) Key Elements of an Effective Website Design for Contractors
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Corey Halstead
Owner, HALSTEAD.
Optimization for mobile was already par for the course for 81% of marketers making social video in 2017.
(source: Animoto)
There’s a reason for that. More and more, the way your prospects first experience your brand is on a mobile device. Hence, site design must now be mobile-first, going beyond mobile-optimized. With the majority of traffic coming from mobile, it’s no longer enough to have a site that “looks good” on mobile, it needs to be built for mobile.
To be effective against the stiffening competition, as well as to sync up with the increasing costs and complexity of home remodeling projects, your site must serve both marketing and sales goals by being highly visual, frequently updated, and easy to update. So let’s take a look at these key points.
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Highly Visual
The design/build industry is not surprisingly visual. From the very start of a consumer’s journey into researching a possible remodeling project, they are lured in by manufacturers and high-end firms with show-stopping videos and photos of luxurious spaces with detailed finishes—all sparing no expense. To reduce friction for the prospect, your design/build firm must continue a similar—or at very least, semi-comparative—experience when they land on your website.
Think large, page-dominating imagery and videos, project case studies that make prospects feel like they are living in the spaces, and visual examples from each of your core services. Before you can begin to convince anyone of your superior installation or the memorable customer experiences you deliver, you must first get their attention by selling the sizzle with a design-first, highly visual design. Carry over your penchant for quality designs in design/build materials and living spaces to what you want to see on your site. It’s another form of design, and in many cases may be the first glimpse of what prospects will see of your work, and they will be judging your ability, and your taste, by the way you represent your own company online.
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Frequently Updated
An outdated website is like an inactive job site. The linear concept of creating a website, launching it, and then redesigning it a few years later is officially dead. This approach could not be more obsolete, and falling into this cycle will not only drain the marketing budget long-term, but it also hurt your lead generation, sales process, and close rate. Websites today are living, breathing things—they are alive. Updating your site with fresh content is what keeps people coming back, and builds up your keywords and search-friendliness, a core element of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Failure to diligently refresh your site risks wasting your investment in building it in the first place. What does this mean from a tactical point of view? Posting new informational articles, new case studies of recently photographed projects, updating homepage images, swapping out older projects with new ones that align more closely to your company’s direction, and keeping all events information current. Successful design/build firms update their websites weekly. Not monthly, not semi-annually…weekly. It’s a standard, incredibly necessary line item in the marketing plan.
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Easy to Update
Because your website is a living, breathing thing that requires updating each week, it only makes sense to have managing those updates be as easy, quick, and cheap as possible. Logical, right? Yet difficult or impossible-to-update sites are one of the most common things we find across the design/build firms we work and speak with all over the country. The horror stories of agencies holding websites hostage requiring only them to make updates, expired domains being sold off by IT companies, and most commonly, overpriced update charges because the website is built on a “finicky WordPress template.” That last one gets us every time.
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To move at the speed required to grow your business today, it is critical—not a nice to have—to free your website from these common chains.
To succeed, design/build firms have limited marketing budgets that can’t be wasted on unnecessary time fighting a complex website platform because an IT firm likes challenging tech-y work. That is just plain foolish. Your company—and quite frankly business model—does not require or warrant a website built using a complex framework—you will never use all the features it offers but you will pay the price in update friction. Instead, you need a platform that delivers everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Allow your agency partner, or in-house team, to move easily and quickly on the backend. Your site must also easily integrate with complementary apps and tools such as marketing automation, email blast software, analytics, lead tracking, and social media. Choosing the right platform addresses all of these concerns as well, leaving budget room to spend on actual ROI-driving initiatives, like paid social campaigns and SEO.
