Elements of a successful startup website
- posted by: NikV on 2014-10-22
- tagged:
tech-company, website
- score: 4
When creating a startup for your product/service. What so you find as the most important element or elements that you put on your website when you first launch?
Do you like giving users pricing tables on the front page or on the pricing page?
Stuff like that would fit well in an answer.
Answer 1090
Ultimately as a start up, a main priority is using your time effectively. I will cover a bit of this first, because this really impacts how much you can put into your website - I understand this is not directly asked and will remove it if not wanted, but this is key to how you approach web design in general for start ups.
Assumptions
I am assuming that you will be someone with little or no web design experience, and thus you will use a template CMS or hire a web designer for this. You specify this is to sell a product/service, so I won’t expect you intend it to be for social purposes.
How does web design impact your start up workload?
Web design is one of those things that can take a relatively small amount of time and cost, or can be expanded to take much more time and cost and ergo work. While this might deliver improvement in sales or interest, it might also turn away some customers. Before looking into the ‘golden’ spot of content, I’d like to say from my experience it varies significantly by field and the business idea, style and flare of the business itself. ‘Arty’ or creative/innovative-USP/inspired businesses usually benefit more from ‘more invested’ websites, by time or monetary means. Additionally, using any time extra that you don’t need to, takes away a bit of your motivation, which is really important to bear in mind - you want to use it as best you can.
Elements to include
Cater to your customers needs
—–
Users generally want different things depending on where they come from, so a good rule is to take this and other information, and customize it. Depending on how you get them to visit your websites - business cards, online advertising, etc, you might want to consider different information (for example, contact for the former and a splash page for the latter).
Inform all basic (universal) needs
—–
This includes:
- A home page with a synopsis of who and what you are, you prime
product/idea, and optionally more ‘sales-like’ info - USP’s, product
detailed description.
- A ‘Contact’ page - though old fashioned, this sole purposed page does it exactly what is says on the tin - leave a form, and make sure to be open to any enquiries, and state this to warm customers in.
- An ‘about’ page, where you can talk more about yourself and your company. Users may get annoyed if such talk is elsewhere, as it can seem ‘egotistic’.
- A separate pricing page. There are two advantages to this: The user firstly gets the information clearly why have this clear? - if it is not where they expect it, they may never find it, and secondly, showing users prices straight of can detract from their experience, as they feel sold too. A good idea is to include basic information in a pricing table, with an expanded sell later down on different packadges or products. This is because they usually want to quickly see what you offer and for how much, and long descriptions get boring quickly.
At the end of the day, you only need the above basic parts, and its probably going to be more beneficial for your time use if you only include those. However, a more expanded website gives more of an impression of professionalism(no source, own experience) and investment into your website, and ergo your business.
Those parts I have through my own web design business found most beneficial include:
- Product launch timer - obviously this only works pre-launch, but it gives your customers a graphical representation and is not that hard to set up (plugins are available easily).
- Social dedication / social buttons - Though you can strap on and might find automatically strapped on social buttons on your template or web design, dedicating a page to news, a blog or a ‘social’ page - events, etc. can give you a much more human face in the field of competition
- “Our history” - expanding on your past, outside of about us (Users navigating there do not usually care for your history, but what you can offer them now) allows more interested users to emotionally connect with your business.
- A & B testing of pages - by investing money or time into getting people to go to slightly altered versions of pages is the most foolproof way I can reasonably see and use for getting better conversion rates. Note that you generally receive diminishing returns, and for a start up, avoiding anomalies is hard. I would suggest you do this for your prices offline and online in addition to your actual web design.
- Email subscription - If you can invest the time, and make sure you strike the balance of generating sales and not annoying sign ups too much, such a programme - the alias of ‘newsletter’ or ‘interesting information’ will gather more sign ups - can generate very good continuous income. I recommend you seek a professional source for this.
Aside from these, there are those which can be beneficial but usually take far too much time to be worth the effort for a start up or generate a negative ROI:
- A corporate page - for start ups, there really is little point, as this serves to do little that your about and contact pages cannot combine to do. It also confuses the user, and makes you seem more cold, depending ofcourse, upon how you label such a page.
- SEO Optimization - it is not really realistic to optimise for SEO nowadays as a start up. Unless you are already in the field, it is very costly to hire someone (you most likely won’t see a positive ROI) and time consuming to do it yourself.
- Social optimization - From my experience, having launched two campaigns with 2 different charities who run campaigns regularly, these take a lot of time and usually yield negative results. Cash prizes and the like can generate interest, but such interest is variable and you are attracting an audience of people who comment, like, etc. for the prospect of a free reward, in other words, those less likely to buy your product.
- ‘Wacky’ design - non standard design is hard for the user to navigate, understand and sometimes decreases your sales. Flash, extensive HTML5 and more are not really feasible until you have a bigger existing / flowing customer base. At any rate I would not recommend flash anymore.
And whatever you do, do not do these:
- Black hat techniques in SEO - This may have worked until 2010, but it really doesn’t now. It could tarnish your site forever with google and others who may represent significant portions of your income. I no-longer know any web designers who practice or recommend this.
- Forum/Social spam - much the same as the above.
- Abuse your friends to generate traffic - they won’t buy your product, you might lose your friendship, and the feedback they give is worth less then an actual member of your target audience.
- Annoying pop ups - Many users get frustrated by these and will close them without reading them, and might even navigate away if they can’t find out how or get annoyed quickly
- A far too sales pitch-like homepage - Whilst this is “Ok” for advert clicks, try to make the customer feel like a friend, not a target.
In summary
Your website can be what you want it to be, but certain things work better then others, and some work better with some people. I highly recommend testing and interacting with your user base, and carefully planning use of your time.
There are many websites and businesses available who focus on web design for start ups. I won’t link any in the name of neutrality but these may be worth it if you have the cash to spare over using a CMS like wordpress.
Answer 1092
- posted by: tiguchi on 2014-10-22
- score: 3
When I am a potential customer of a product or service I expect the following information to be available on a website:
Eye-catching landing page
I do not want to have to click or guess around, when I arrive at a product / service website.
- Have a very brief slogan / paragraph that explains the product / service at a glance
- Clear menu structure with link for pricing, link for more detailed information, “about company”, contact link
- Optional demo video that is short and to the point (and not too cheesy)
- Select testimonials with pictures and logos of preferably well-known customers (builds trust). Try to avoid making them up. Get actual customers to say something nice about your product / service.
- If available: media reactions about your product / service
Also helpful:
- Clear and bold “call to action” button, that leads you right away to the registration / purchase process.
- Take modern trends into account. I’m shallow enough to kind of like those things, such as
CSS “parallax scrolling” tricks, big slightly blurred imagery in the background. Some websites also present their products like a really well done power-point presentation with transition effects that are played back by scrolling the page. But beware: this is just a matter of taste and it may be off-putting for some people. Test what works for you (A/B split test plugins are available for your favorite CMS such as Wordpress).
About Company
I want to be able to easily trust that company. I noticed that the availability of the following information makes a service / product and the company behind it appear more trustworthy to me:
- Professional looking, friendly portraits of company staff, with their names and roles.
- Details about the company: type, location, when was it founded, by whom.
- Tell us a short story about the company, the idea and passion behind it. Make it a bit personal and approachable.
- Tie the business to the city where it is located. Make it appear like a proud local business. Being able to pinpoint a company to an actual location also builds trust in me, way more than a business that decides to remain anonymous and without a real location.
New startups also appear more approachable and get a human touch, when there are group pictures available of the whole team, smiling or cheering. That can also give you a glimpse at the office location, and the bigger the team the better. That’s an indicator that the business is running successfully.
Pricing
To me a clear pricing table is a must have feature and it’s usually the very first link I click on a page, in order to gauge at a glance if I should consider the service more carefully or if it is out of my league.
Being open and honest about your pricing structure helps me personally to make my purchase decision. I do not want to be hindered by having to fill in contact forms at the risk of getting spam mails or calls from sales people.
Hiding away the pricing information also tells me, as an average Joe, that I’m probably not able to afford the service.
There may be difficulties if your business is both B2B and B2C and tries to run a dual pricing scheme. Usually you can get around that problem by having an affordable entry level and on top of that optional “enterprisey” extra features that also cost way more. You may want to offer academic and mass-license discounts and maybe you can also provide a “get a quote” button for letting the business people talk to each other.
To me it is also important to clearly see what is offered for the money. Do not deceptively hide any catches here (e.g. in the manner of mobile phone carriers and their “unlimited data” claims with an asterisk and tiny fine-print that basically contradicts their claims).
Technicalities
- Use
https! Get a real, trusted SSL certificate for your website and completely run it over https. Do not allow any unencrypted http connections (redirect them to the encrypted ones). If you are dealing with customer registrations and purchases there is no excuse for being sloppy with their confidential data.
- Offer a good mobile layout / theme for your website - do not redirect mobile client requests to alternative “mobile.yourcompany.com” links, since that creates inconsistencies when visitors try to share / bookmark links between mobile device and desktop PC.
- Do not force your mobile app on visitors of your homepage. That seems to be the latest fad all over the place and it is highly annoying, when you browse the web on a mobile device, to be greeted with a popup message saying: “Do you want to download our special app?”. I usually leave websites like that right away.
- Use your real, own company address and your own good name for your Internet domain name registration. Do not hide behind domain name proxy or hiding services (such as GoDaddy’s). That will be perceived as suspicious by tech-savvy customers.
“Lean Startup” Stuff
If you start out so fresh, that there is virtually no product, yet, you can come up with a landing page that provides a teaser for your product and a “sign me up for updates when it is available” form that let’s your visitors enter their email address.
By doing that:
- You gauge interest in your product - is it worth developing? Does it need changes?
- You can carefully re-adjust the wording, layout, logo, slogan, keywords etc. in order to see if more or less people tend to register. Use A/B testing methods for that, for having a “control group” (old landing page versus new landing page).
- You get a list of potential early customers.
Answer 8589
There are many components to make your website successful. Here are some of those:
- You can make a video introducing your company, office, and your team for it is a great tool you can incorporate into your website. Some people prefer to "moving" information and images than reading the content, so it is ideal to make a video on how to use your product, maximize your services, and so on. Make it more entertaining while sharing information about your business.
- You can also use graphics to deliver anything about your business by showing interesting photos, illustrations, graphs, etc. Click here, and observe how they use those for their business.
- Endorsement from customers who are satisfied with your products is very helpful in the success of your website. So there should be an option that the customers can provide or write their testimonial about your market.
- It is very important to have a correct and updated contact information on your website. Make it visible on all pages to make customers easier to contact you by phone or email, and whenever they have questions, suggestions, concerns, or problems, they can easily reach you.
- Make sure all aspects of speed at your site are considered particularly in mobile devices.
- One of the most important element is making sure that your website is
responsive, and customers can easily understand and navigate your
website in all devices.
Answer 1091
- posted by: atse on 2014-10-22
- score: 1
I think in general, I would like to see pricing near the bottom of the landing page (I would want to scroll to it and not see it as soon as I got to your site) or on a separate page that is easily accessible (such as on the menu bar) especially if you have multiple products/plans.
It would be ideal to me as as customer to see more information about your products/services before you hand me a price tag because if I see a price tag that’s out of my range, I’ll usually just leave. But if you can successfully pitch the product , there is a bit of flexibility regarding how much I’d be willing to pay because suddenly, my desire for your product is higher than what it was before.
Lastly, while this is not content specific, I do believe that websites that have a hefty amount of animations are very attractive to the customer. It adds entertainment value and gives the customer the sense that you’re the real deal if you can afford to develop something like that (even if it doesn’t cost that much to develop the front end)
Answer 7277
- posted by: irms on 2015-09-06
- score: 1
The two most important elements on a website that advertises a product or service are:
- What does your product or service DO FOR your customer. (Headline + tagline)
- What has to happen for your customer to get started? (Pricing + signup)
The rest of what you add to the website is SUPPORTING information for what you just promised your customer. Things like social proof (testimonials), a gallery or tour and FAQ.
Focus on the two items above and the rest of your website should support those statements.
Answer 1096
- posted by: blunders on 2014-10-23
- score: 0
The best website is no website; unless you need one, and if you need one, then build only what is needed, nothing more.
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