Creating a business website or even hiring a professional to make it look modern and stylish is rarely enough to make it successful. There are a lot of aspects you need to think about and work on that may stand in the way of your website fulfilling its purpose efficiently, regardless of how visually impressive it is. To help you out in this process and to save you a considerable amount of time and budget, website consultants are happy to offer their services.
In today’s article, we’re going to explore the great truth about what product design consulting actually is and why you need it.
Actual consulting
The primary reason for which you might need a website consultant is to get a great piece of advice based on their knowledge and experience regarding how to run your website in the best way. This may include various sides of your company’s web page like design, functionality, online visibility, etc. Let’s get a closer look at how a website design consultant can assist you in this matter.
1. Help in updating your website design
When you were building your website you certainly had some kind of vision of it and wanted it to reflect your company’s values. However, it might be difficult to visualize your concept correctly and only a web design expert can do that. For this reason, hiring a web consultant to get suggestions on how to create the best style for your website is a great idea. They tend to keep an eye on the latest web design trends and so they’ll know how to use your web page space in the best way. It can also be a good option if you just want to refresh your website and make it more modern.
2. Create a brand identity
To become memorable for the customers and more visible on the market, you need to create a unique brand identity and, as your website is one of the immediate visual representations of your company, it plays a crucial role in defining how it’s perceived in general. Therefore, a website consultant can become indispensable during this process. They will gather all appropriate information like your company’s values, mission, and philosophy. After that, they’ll come up with the perfect visual interpretation of your brand’s identity and incorporate it into your website.
3. Build a website strategy
You might think that creating a great website is just enough for it to be effective. But it’s not just that simple. Think of your website as a part of your marketing campaign – it should have a plan, purpose, and contribute to your business in the best way. For this reason, hiring a web consulting agency to assist you in this process can turn your website into a profitable marketing tool. Web consultants will analyze your business goals and will offer you the best options for how you can use your online platform to achieve them.
4. Understand your target audience
For all the steps listed above, it’s crucial to understand who your target audience is. It can drastically change your website design. Product design consulting specialists will analyze your current base of clients, your product or service you’re providing and the customers you’re aiming at cooperating with. Then, with their UX knowledge, they will create a user persona for your website, meaning the ideal user type that might visit your website. All this information will help you to build a design that will attract clients for whom you created your product/service in the first place.
5. Make SEO-friendly
Your website’s visibility is directly related to how SEO-friendly it is. Google tends to rank up not only the most relevant websites but also the most well-made ones. So, if your website has a reduced number of visitors, it’s probably because it’s simply not visible for Google. A web design consultant will guide you through the latest tricks in SEO and will advise you on the best-working keywords for your website. Also, they will point out what you need to change in your website content-wise and explain what’s dragging your website down.
6. Make sense of your website traffic
By conducting a detailed analysis of your website reposts, a web design consultant can derive essential information from them that can boost your conversion rate considerably. They will not only tell you who your audience is and from where they come from, but will also find out insights about your landing pages, whether your website is fulfilling its initial goal, your organic search traffic, and many more. All this information is your guideline for what you’re doing right and where you’ve gone off track, so having a professional to make sense of it can significantly contribute to your website’s efficiency.
Web design consulting on the tech side
Of course, your website doesn’t consist only of good looks and well-written content. There’re a lot of technical aspects you need to think about and keep updated. Your website needs to always work properly and should be optimized for working at the highest speed; otherwise, instead of attracting more customers, it’ll push them away. Obviously, you simply can’t be familiar with all the technicalities, no one has time to keep track of everything. So, this is how a website consultant can help you with that.
8. Occupy with coding
Very often a website consultant is also a web developer, meaning that, even though primarily they aim to give their clients guidance and advice, their knowledge and experience allow them to manage the coding of your website too. They’ll make sure no HTML elements are missing, and that there are no mistakes in your website code in general – one wrong step can ruin everything and lead to not only misplaced content but an even worse outcome. So, to prevent that, get a professional to take a look at your website core, or even manage it on a regular basis.
9. Fix the usability issues
Exceptional user experience is a foundation for every successful website. But thousands of websites lose their users and can’t deliver their message correctly just because of usability issues. The content that is difficult to read because of its format or color, the webpage menu that is challenging to navigate – all these issues leave your user irritated with your website. A web design consultant will take a detailed look at it and point out the issues to fix – from the most obvious to the more complex ones – to prevent the decrease in visitors’ numbers.
10. Make your website optimized
Besides conducting the keywords research and making your website visible, a website consultant will also check how your website is performing in terms of speed. They will analyze how your website is performing from the technical perspective and will offer you to introduce some changes like improving server response time, optimize visuals (images, videos, GIFs), enable file compression, etc. By speeding up your website, you reduce the risk of getting punished by Google for the slow speed of your website and increase its chances to rank higher.
When do you need a website consultant?
You might ask yourself whether you actually need a website design consultant and the answer probably will be yes. Regardless of whether you feel like your website is underperforming or not, website design consulting can contribute a lot to your website development. There’s a simple rule – when you invest more in your website, you’ll get more output, and that might be a key to your business success.