How to Design a Business Website to Exceed Your Customers’ Needs

Customer experience on a business website is crucial because of how deeply it’s tied to a company’s identity. A website is often a primary communication channel, as well as a hub for online marketing. 

In the case of e-commerce, the website is likely one of the only places customers will interact with the brand.

It is possible to identify and exceed customers’ needs when designing a business website. Brands must appeal to different expectations and desires, depending on factors like audience demographics and business goals. However, there are a few things people will want from any business website.

These six tips will help you meet and exceed customers’ needs when designing or revamping your website.

1. Cover the Basics

Information about the business is something customers expect from a website.

There should be pages with relevant details — like an about page, FAQs, contact information, shipping details, and store hour and address if the business has a brick-and-mortar location. These pages should be easily accessible from almost anywhere on the website, either via the header or another navigation tool.

These pages will quickly cover the first questions customers have about a business — who they are, what they sell, why they’re different and how they can buy.

2. Optimize for Load Speed

Taken as a whole, visitors do not like to wait. There is a lot of content available on the internet, and people have options. According to Google, 53% of mobile device users will bounce away if a page takes more than three seconds to load.

Optimizing for load speed can be one of the most effective ways to use web design to grow your business — and it’s often not too hard to implement. Keeping scripts and CSS light and compressing large or detailed images will help you cut down on loading time. Minifying your website code and reducing HTTPS redirects can also help out.

3. Design for Popular Devices

More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your business website isn’t optimized for mobile, visitors could be stuck with poor loading times, broken features and difficult-to-impossible navigation.

When designing, it’s good to take what you know about your audience to provide the most streamlined experience for as many customers as possible. For many businesses, this will mean optimizing the website for mobile devices. 

This may even be true for businesses that are typically seen as not needing mobile optimization — like B2B companies that primarily serve other brands.  

4. Take Advantage of New Technology

Advanced tech can help you meet customers’ needs quicker. For example, some users prefer to talk with a chatbot rather than fill out a form with their information. Conversational interfaces are often more pleasant to use than lead forms, especially if a business needs to collect a lot of information. Longer forms can be somewhat intimidating or overwhelming.

Other new technology can help you further streamline the browsing experience. Progressive web apps (PWAs), for example, use browser APIs to provide an app-like experience to mobile users without requiring that they exit their browser or download a standard mobile application.

5. Don’t Forget About Security of Your Business Website

High-profile data breaches and a growing discussion around the ethical use of personal information has made security a bigger topic than ever. 

Customers are likely providing your business with a lot of information. It may be demographic and semi-anonymous or highly specific — like passwords, email addresses and credit card numbers.

A modern business needs to be a good steward of the customer data it collects. Simple adjustments to a website and business data policy, like SSL certification and encrypting sensitive data, can provide security. These changes will help protect customer and website information against man-in-the-middle attacks, as well as breaches.

6. Be Ready to Iterate

You may not always get it right on the first try. Sometimes, limited information about customer needs, shifting business preferences or even little oversights can make a website fail to fully meet or exceed expectations.

Understanding your audience is critical to building a business website, but you may not have all the information you need when you start designing. The best way to solve this problem is to make iteration part of the process and collect plenty of data that will tell you if you’re meeting customer desires.

Website performance metrics — like bounce rate, average time on page and top page by traffic — can give you a good sense of customers’ qualitative experience while on your website. High average session times, return visitors and steadily growing traffic demonstrates that people enjoy using the website and keep coming back. An above-average bounce rate or low session times may suggest elements are bogging down the experience. 

Even simple, form-based surveys can help a lot here. Ask customers how they feel about the current website and provide a space for their thoughts. You may be surprised by the tweaks they suggest.

7. Building a Business Website That Outdoes Customer Expectations

A business’s website is one of the most important factors in overall customer experience. With the right approach, any brand can create a website that meets and exceeds needs, providing the best possible experience.

Simple tweaks that make load times faster, readily available business information and new technology can all improve the quality of a website. However, any web designer should be ready to continuously collect data and adjust a website to go above and beyond audience expectations. 

About the author:

Lexie is an IoT enthusiast, an aspiring Olympic curler and a web designer. She enjoys hiking with her goldendoodle and checking out local flea markets. Visit her design blog, Design Roast, and connect with her on Twitter @lexieludesigner.

Share Article

Follow Us

Return to Previous Page