A Single Website Serves Several Purposes

web

web

Websites today need to do more. While they serve as an introduction to your business to new customers, they also need to offer a way for buyers to take action. Plus, they need to encourage people to interact with your business, build loyalty, and enhance your brand — all on a single web page that can be read on a tiny smartphone screen.

Whew! That’s a lot. But it’s what’s required for successful online interactions.

Time Is Money

The average amount of time people spend on a web page is 45 seconds. And it’s far less they don’t instantly find what they want once they land there. So your website only has a few seconds — or even a fraction of a second — to make a big impression. The longer you can keep people on your website, the more likely they are to take the desired action you want. And the less time they will spend visiting your competitors’ pages.

That means your websites have to work right the first time. They need to be eye-catching, informative, and intuitive. And you have to give people a clear path to the action you want them to take — whether it’s buying your products or services, offering their contact information, or generating a lead for future pursuit.

Lytron Web Design

The professional web designers at Lytron have the knowledge, tools, and experience to make your websites highly effective. We make it easy for people to find your business online. Then once, they arrive on your website, they will stay there longer, take action sooner, and give you the results you want faster.

Today’s websites have to serve a lot of purposes and they need to do it quickly. With Lytron Web Design on your side, you can be sure your web pages are getting proven results that work.

Tone More Important than Words or Pictures

businessman computer keyboard working concept

businessman computer keyboard working concept

What’s more important to a successful website: Engaging and attractive images or great written content that successfully captures in words the message you are trying to express? The answer is neither. The overall tone or “feel” of the website is the one thing visitors will notice most.

Words and pictures contribute to the tone. But so do intuitive design, ease of use, layout, and a hundred other elements. Putting them all together into one cohesive, effective web page is the secret to online success.

True Value

You can spend a fortune on licensed images or pay a content writer a bundle of money to create great descriptive copy, but none of that is going to be worth anything if your website’s tone isn’t instantly and immediately clear to the first-time visitor. The truth is nobody is going to spend enough time on your website to notice your great pictures and flowery words if they don’t feel comfortable from the moment they arrive there.

Professional web designers understand that a great web page is more than just the sum of its collective parts. It’s the way they all fit together to offer visitors a unique and engaging experience that adds genuine value to their ability to interact with your business. And that’s what Lytron Web Design specializes in providing its clients.

More than a Feeling

It’s important to remember that people land on your web page because they want to be there. They are actively searching for a company or entity that is providing exactly the type of product or service you are offering. But it’s also important to note that there are probably hundreds if not thousands of other web pages offering exactly the same thing.

Getting people not only to stay but to keep coming back again and again requires the perfect balance of tone, words, pictures, design, and a myriad of other elements available from Lytron Web Design.

Don’t Test Customers’ ‘Boiling Point’

Brand Design

Brand Design

If your website is not optimized, at a certain point, customers who visit your website are going to become so frustrated that they will reach their “boiling point”. This is the moment when they give up and log off.

Frustration levels can grow due to a number of reasons, the most frequent of which are slow loading speeds, frequent crashing, or non-intuitive navigation. If any or all of these are associated with a visit to your business’s web pages, you may be losing more customers than you are gaining.

Test Drive Your Website

Many business owners launch their websites then rarely or never visit them again. This is a mistake. Lots of things can go wrong post-launch, especially if you aren’t continually “test driving” your website.

For example, load times can come at a snail’s pace. This is often caused by overloaded servers, the use of cheap and/or poorly managed hosting services, or code problems within the website itself. The most common cause of “boiling points” is when visitors get fed up with waiting and leave a site out of frustration, often never to return.

The simple solution is to periodically check in on your website’s function by visiting it anonymously as a customer. Then you can see first-hand what your customers experience when visiting your business online. The results may surprise you — and not in a good way.

Fixing Problems

Identifying issues that frustrate customers is the first step. Fixing them quickly and effectively is the second.

Once you understand why people are logging away from your website, a sense of urgency should set in to correct and improve the issue so that it stops turning people away. Addressing common problems like loading speeds and crashes helps your business attract and retain a larger share of your potential market.

For Websites, Time Is Money

sites 1

sites 1

People today have shorter attention spans than ever. So they aren’t going to spend any more time on your website than necessary to determine if you offer what they want.

Call it the Amazon effect or attribute it to video games or TikTok videos, but when it comes to web design time is money: Specifically, their time is your money. If you don’t give people what they want INSTANTLY, they are going to click off your site and go to a competitor. That’s why today’s web design needs to be faster, clearer, and more user-oriented than ever.

Nobody Cares

Small business owners live and breathe their businesses. They are passionate about what they do. And if they could, they would spend all day talking about their products and services. The problem is that in the virtual world, nobody wants to hear about them.

Instead, people today are so accustomed to clicking on, getting what they want, and clicking off that they don’t have the time or inclination to spend a second more than they have to on your site. So successful small business owners choosing to do business in the virtual world (which is just about everybody these days) need to embrace these new realities.

Simple, Speedy Websites

Effective web design has no time for long, verbose blocks of text. It has no room for passionate stories about the company’s founding or values. Every word, image, headline, or quote needs to serve the specific function of pushing the visitor to do what they came there for in the first place: Buy the products or services you offer.

The online world is fast and getting faster. People won’t tolerate slow, congested websites that take their time getting to the point. Everything today is now, now, now. Smart small business owners understand this and adapt to the times.

Think of Your Website as Your Storefront

credit card on laptop

credit card on laptop

Business owners who have brick and mortar buildings invest a lot of time, money, and effort in making their facade presentable. Customers are going to be more attracted to a storefront that is neatly swept, has clean windows, and has a large, attractive sign.

For people doing business online, their website is their storefront. So they need to make the same investment into their website as they would put into maintaining the physical facade of their business if it were an actual building.

Design and Upkeep

Besides location, the presentation of a retail operation is among the top priorities for any business owner. Nobody wants to walk into a store that is dirty, run-down, or uninviting. That’s why the owners of physical businesses invest so much money in their physical plant — from the upfront costs of design and construction to the ongoing line item of upkeep and maintenance.

The same holds true for owners of virtual businesses. Commissioning an attractive website that is both informative and instinctive to use is critical to attracting new visitors. But continually updating and maintaining that same website so that it doesn’t crash and is fast and easy for users is equally important.

Lytron Web Design

At Lytron Web Design, we can handle both responsibilities for you. We will collaborate with you to create a compelling website that will convert first-time visitors into long-term customers. Then we will maintain, upgrade, and continually improve your website so that it keeps serving your business and building your bottom line.

In the same way the owner of a business in the real world has to deal with many different aspects of running their business, your virtual business puts a lot of demands on your time and attention. When Lytron Web Design is on the job building, maintaining, and improving your website, thats’ one more thing you can take off your plate.

What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?

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30 bc1p3meybi5ttq2iy w

Many small business owners think they can save a little money by building their own website, or perhaps having a gamer nephew or computer science major son or daughter do it for them. There are actually plenty of “pick and plug” services out there that allow you to build great-looking, functional websites quickly and relatively affordably.

That’s all well and good. But what happens when the website crashes? What are you going to do when something goes wrong?

Time Is Money

In today’s web-based business environment, even the smallest businesses depend on the internet for a large percentage of their customers. So every minute that your business website is down, that’s sales you aren’t making.

Inexperienced web designers may be able to use free tools to build attractive, functional websites. But the minute something goes wrong, they usually lack the skills and experience to fix it. Then business owners are at the mercy of professional web designers who can charge essentially anything they want to get their websites back up and running as quickly as possible.

A better plan is simply to have reputable, experienced web designers at Lytron Web Design create your business website for you in the first place. We have been coding long enough to know how to avoid the most common mistakes that first-time web designers almost always make. Plus, if anything does happen to go wrong, we usually know exactly how to fix it almost immediately so you can minimize your downtime and maximize your sales and profits.

Web Deisgn Professionals

Saving money in the short run by having your computer nerd cousin build your business website can cost you a lot more in the long run.

A better plan is to let the experienced professionals at Lytron Web Design create the attractive, appealing, and problem-free website your business needs to compete in the digital marketplace.

Google Remains the World’s Most Popular Search Engine

google partner
google partner
google partner

When creating content for the internet, it’s critical that it’s designed to appeal to search engines. But the question is which one?

There are dozens of companies that sort and prioritize search results for internet users. But Google remains the world’s most popular, accounting for more than 70% of all searches done online. And in the all-important area of mobile traffic, Google captures 80% of all users. So if you are going to please any search engine with your content, make it Google.

Why Google?

There are two reasons why Google has been so effective in capturing the lion’s share of online searches. The first is early adoption. When the internet was still being formed and not used by many people, Google already had identified its potential and the future need for a fast, effective algorithm that could quickly sort, prioritize, and list search results for users who type in just a couple of key words.

Google also made sure the results it provided were relevant, accurate, and high-quality. By continually updating the algorithm it uses to sort through the trillions of web documents now available online, Google has been able to prevent content providers from rigging the system so their pages ended up at the top of the search engine results page even if they weren’t the best results for the user.

Free Ninety-Nine

The other advantage Google offered is that it has always been free for people to use. The company that owns the search engine understood that more money could be made from advertisers than from charging individuals to use their service. That strategy worked and today Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the world’s wealthiest companies, with annual revenue of about $75.32 billion.

So if you are going to appeal to a search engine, make sure it’s Google, the world’s fastest, best, and most popular.

Slow Loading Times Spell Trouble for Websites

sites 1

sites 1

Have you ever had the experience of clicking on a website link and then waiting what seems like an eternity for it to load onto your phone, tablet, or computer? While the actual time may only have been a few seconds or a minute at most, each second web visitors wait exponentially increases the likelihood they are going to give up and go somewhere else.

And if it’s your business’s website that is loading slowly, that could mean lost sales, damage to your reputation, and harm to your brand.

Why Is It So Slow?

You probably worked very hard to get your website just right. You may have paid a designer to make it visually appealing, a programmer to make it easy to navigate, and a marketer to make sure it gets placed at or near the top of the Google search engine page. But all that money is wasted if it loads so slowly that people are jumping off before they ever get to see it.

So why do weblinks load so slowly sometimes? It could be one of any number of things. But the most likely culprit is that your site features too many images that are unoptimized. If you include high-resolution images on your web pages, these eat up a lot of bandwidth while loading — especially if you upload larger-sized images then scale them down to a smaller size. This can fool the user’s device into thinking that your website is much bigger than it actually is, causing it to load much more slowly.

Quick Fixes

The best solution is to have the web developers at Lytron optimize your website so that it loads quickly and efficiently, reducing the number of visitors who click off out of load time frustration.

Our experienced, professional web designers have the skills, tools, and expertise to optimize your pages so they load instantly onto visitors’ devices.

Minimalism Trending for Single-Page Websites

Brand Design

Brand Design

Minimalism is nothing new. In fact, the minimalist art movement began right after World War II and featured such as the artist Mondrian, the composer Philip Glass, and the author Samuel Beckett. Some saw it as a reaction to the abstract art movement of the early 20th Century, replacing the old way of doing things with something newer and simpler.

Eventually, this art movement was replaced by something else. Yet the best qualities of minimalism continue to reverberate today in the world of web design as more and more page creators turn to simple yet spare single-page websites to attract and keep visitors.

Elements of Minimalism

As the name implies, minimalism in page design can be summed by the saying, “Less is more.” It’s a classic approach to web design that continues to be increasingly popular among business websites. The minimalist aesthetic embraces both beauty and functionality simultaneously. It eliminates anything extraneous so page viewers can focus on a few simple images and plain fonts that give just the bare essentials.

Minimalist websites are user-friendly and typically feature intuitive navigation. They also have simplified color schemes, usually keeping to just three or four colors and that’s it. They also tend to rely on the creative and bold use of typography as the central design element.

The Opposite Busy

Rather than cluttering the available space with competing images, text, animation, and more, minimalist websites keep things simple and plain for the visitor. They generally have flat, simple backgrounds as opposed to heavily textured ones. And they offer a clean aesthetic that matches the brevity of the content.

Minimalism isn’t for everybody. But for some small businesses, it can be a simple yet effective way to underscore their theme and enhance their brand by challenging their customers less, not more. To find out if minimalism works for your online branding, consult the web design experts at Lytron Strategic.

 

When It Comes to Graphics, Consistency Is King

swot woman working at office 3TN59UJ

swot woman working at office 3TN59UJ

Things like the font you use for your text, the colors you use for lettering and background, and the size, positioning, and even gloss you use for your images are hugely important to the success of your website. More than anything, they need to be CONSISTENT.

People visiting your website will instantly become acclimated to the way you present your business and your brand online. So if you suddenly shift gears with a different color scheme, new fonts, or changes in letter sizing or image presentation, it’s going to be jarring to them. Your page visitors subconsciously want to be reassured that everything on your web pages will be consistent — even if they click through to another page.

Creating Consistency

You can often tell the business owners who built their own web pages. Maybe they had some experience in college in web design or decided to take an online course. Either way, while their websites may have all the right pieces — text content, headlines, pictures, click-through buttons, and so on — somehow they don’t have a consistent flow.

What’s missing from a website built by an amateur and those created by web design professionals like those you will find at Lytron Strategic is flow. Creating this consistent flow throughout the entire web visit experience is something that comes with years of experience.

Experience Matters

At Lytron, we literally have created hundreds of websites for dozens of small business owners. And through the years, we’ve developed the instinctive ability to make every element of a website look like it fits with everything else.

Allow us to put our decades of cumulative experience to work for your small business by letting us create a consistent, effective, and attractive website that instantly appeals to both first-time visitors and long-time customers alike.

In web design, consistency is the name of the game. At Lytron Strategic, our experience is your website’s biggest strength.