Lately, everyone keen on explaining how you can future-proof your website, or design smarter content.. but only few actually explain why. That’s where we come in.
The days when a business website could be a page or two, describing its purpose are long behind us. These days, everyone is buzzing about intelligent web design – about tailoring the content on your website to the visitor in best way as possible. But why does any of that matter?
Why should you actually care how is your website’ made?
We’re looking to explore this question beyond vague assurances that it’ll improve sales and customer outcomes – which it will. See, there are plenty of advantages to intelligent design that stem well beyond the sales funnel. Today, we’ll explore just five of them.
“Little changes can have a huge impact on the clients and your business,” explains Professor Shlomo Benartzi to The Globe and Mail. “It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of money – just some behavioural savvy and the willingness to experiment.”
Let’s begin.
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It Offers An Enhanced User Experience
I want you to take a moment and imagine what you believe to be the perfect website. What sort of design decisions, color palettes, and language appeal to you as a person? Consider: the less someone has in common with you, the more their answer will differ.
A site that attracts a young, twentysomething tech professional will thus look quite different from one designed for a fifty year old lawyer or financier. Offering the right experience to your audience is critical. Intelligent web design plays a large part in that.
“When the customer experience is better, your customers are happier,” writes Copy Blogger’s Demian Farnworth. “And when customers are happier, you make more money.”
It Leads To Better Content
Continuing along the lines of a positive customer experience, being smarter with your site will inevitably lead to better content – primarily because it will lead to a website whose content and design mesh seamlessly with one another. There’s a reason automated design tools like Grid tailor a site’s layout and appearance based on content. It’s what works.
By carrying out a deep analysis of your site’s content, you’ll be able to better tailor everything else about your site to fit with it. And by doing that, you’ll make things significantly better for the end user.
It Allows You To Prepare For The Future
By fostering a deeper understanding of your site and the content it hosts, you’ll be better-equipped for the future. See, as I’m certain you well know, the tech industry is prone to rather rapid changes. What works one day might be obsolete the next.
Your business needs to be prepared for these changes, and capable of adjusting to them. Otherwise, it’s going to lose out on both traffic and business when the market shifts. The spread of the mobile Internet – or more accurately, the inability of many businesses to adjust due to an outdated website – is a prime example of this.
“”Each content type your organization produces should adopt a lifecycle that is performance-based,” explains author Kevin Nichols in a conversation with E Content Magazine. “This requires technology but also people and governance to support it. It also requires that content is structured and tagged in a way to support reuse and scalability, such as multichannel publishing and the ability to change in the future. If you set up a performance-based model properly, you are going to have the benefit of a future-proofed solution.”
It Reduces Overhead
Last but certainly not least, an intelligently-designed website reduces costs across the board. Not only will you need to spend less money on updating your site to keep with market trends, you’ll also spend less assisting customers in navigating a poorly-designed site. Sounds like a win-win, right?
“Solid website usability and automation reduces the money needs for frivolous customer support,” advises Eric Sharp of Protofuse. “An intelligent website is easy-to-use and integrates with automated systems to decrease the need for perpetual customer support.”
Closing Thoughts
Everyone is always saying how intelligent web design will improve customer outcomes, without really paying much mind to how. Now that you’ve a better idea of what it can actually do for your business, however, you’ve every reason to embrace it. After all, the satisfaction of your customers – and the bottom line of your competitors – depends on it.
About Matthew Davis — Matthew works as an inbound marketer and blogger for Future Hosting, a leading provider of VPS hosting. Follow Future Hosting on Twitter at @fhsales, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, http://www.futurehosting.com/blog.
