Whether you’re an up-and-coming business or a long-established company, you know that having an online presence is essential. Specifically, a well-designed website. If you’ve hired Los Angeles web design experts like Drive Traffic Media, then you’re probably already thinking about how the site is going to look: images, videos, font, colors. All of these things are important when it comes to design. However, there is another essential element that must be considered during the creation of a new website or a redesign: the content.
A beautiful website is a beautiful website, but you need content that describes who you are as a business and what you can offer your target audience. Otherwise, it won’t matter how nice it looks. Similarly, your amazing content will be wasted on a poorly designed website. That’s why so many people look for marketing agencies that offer web design in Los Angeles. With a masterful design and well-crafted copywriting, your website will be optimized for user engagement, search engine rankings, and conversion rates.
The problem with solely looking at the design is that you will create a superficially good website. The theme, layout, and colors might look good with the default text and default photos, but you won’t know how to fill it out if you haven’t considered the content you need to include. If you settle on a design without considering your content in the process, then you will find yourself having to scramble to fill the text boxes and headers. You might end up compromising the copywriting because you are limited by the design you’ve chosen.
Another problem that could arise when you focus on the design before the copywriting is that you may sacrifice the ease of navigation. Users should be able to find the information they need from your website without searching for too long. In other words, the organization should match your content requirements rather than simply aesthetic preference. It should be a balance of form and function. A web design company in Los Angeles will tell you to create content before and alongside web development in order to avoid these pitfalls.
Content is something that needs attention early on in your design process. You should be thinking about your homepage, about us page, contact us page, services or products page, and blog page. When you incorporate these elements early on, you leave yourself more room for creativity. Let form follow function so that you can make design choices easier on yourself. If you are stressed about creating search-engine-optimized web copy and blogs every month, then consider hiring a marketing agency with blog-writing services. A strong writing team will save you time and energy as you’re building your website.
Los Angeles web design experts say that when you’re getting ready for a website launch you should share a game plan with your team. It may be enough to just set deadlines, or you might need to have a general roadmap to reference. Try to answer these questions as you’re creating a timeline:
- How much content needs to be written?
- What existing content can be reused?
- How much design does the website need (starting from scratch or a redesign)?
- How many formal reviews will it take to approve the design?
- How many formal reviews will it take to approve the content?
You may not be able to answer all of these questions honestly because, as we all know, things change. You have to leave a little bit of wiggle room in case you run into some problems with approval. A project management software can help keep your team on track through the whole process. If you’re handing over most of the design and copywriting tasks to an agency, then make sure you leave enough room for communication and collaboration. You should still be highly involved in the creation process, even if you aren’t doing the bulk of the work.
While, on the surface, a website might seem like just a few WordPress pages and a domain, there is much more to web development than you might think. In order to avoid being sued, businesses must make their websites ADA compliant. This ensures accessibility for people with disabilities. Plus, many industries require websites to be heavily optimized for search engines with their various products. Think about a website with a hundred products and some of the products have different color options or styles. Every form of the product needs its own landing page and all of these pages need to load properly on the domain. Loading speed, scrolling speed, and ease of navigation will affect both the consumer’s impression of the brand and the web crawlers who are ranking sites for Google.
Anyone can design a website but not everyone can do it well. There are certain functionalities and rules of aesthetics that are only known by experts. If you think about your website as a marketing tool, then you want to make sure it encourages the prospect to stay awhile and explore your product or service. It should draw their attention with interesting images and text, without overwhelming them with too much animation. The reason that companies hire web designers is to get the eye and opinion of a professional. The best designers will make suggestions based on their knowledge but they will also listen to your preferences and concerns. As you collaborate with designers and writing teams, you will understand why it takes time to get a website ready to launch.
Drive Traffic Media is a full-service agency that offers web design, copywriting services, social media management, ad campaigns, and more. We can help you redesign your current website or design a completely new one with Google ranking in mind. Whether you are a big operation or a small Mom and Pop shop, we can help you target your audience and increase traffic for your business. If you are ready to grow your business in the new year, then contact our marketing experts at (310) 341-3939. Ask for a free website audit or website marketing analysis!