The Importance Of Being Professional

You Can Punch Above Your Weight

Small businesses and SME's are now able to compete with larger, perhaps more established companies using proven online marketing techniques. The internet provides a much more level playing field on which they can compete on fairer terms. If they're active and agile enough, small businesses can compete with much bigger hitters very effectively - as long as they have well a designed site with highly relevant content and a smart digital marketing strategy.

Presenting a professional online image has a direct impact on people's perceptions of your company and your products. This all takes place before they take any decisions on what they are going to buy, and from which online seller. People will abandon a website for what you may consider trivial reasons: speed of loading, spelling errors, quality of imagery, and the general look and feel for the website and the purchasing experience. They will definitely be subliminally comparing your website against your competitors. It is vital therefore, that you present yourself in a very dynamic and highly professional manner.

User Experience is Vital to Success

Dress To Impress

To make an impact, user experience (or UX) needs to be considered on every page. Presenting all your products or services in a consistent and efficient way will help your visitors out. They will feel more engaged and give the sense that your website is helping them to make the right choices.

Use consistent fonts and colours to present a uniformly professional image. Make it easy for customers to buy once they are ready. It helps to have clear 'call to action' buttons or devices on each page so the visitor doesn’t have to click or move around to search for the link which enables them to place an order or send an enquiry.

Load Speeds Are Important

Speed of page loading is a fundamental consideration for all commercial websites. You are likely to lose 13% of all ‘clickers’ on average for every second your webpage takes to load. So in just 5 seconds you may likely lose 65% of potential visitors. Yet many companies feel that a video on their home page is desirable even though it may be detrimental to the over page load speed. Fast pages give the perception of a professional website, so ensure yours passes the speed test. In addition, over 50% of browsing is now carried out on mobile devices so speed testing should be carried out for all browsing devices.

Professional Photography is Always a Good Investment

You should always use professional photography for your website. This may be specially commissioned for your specific products or sourced from an online stock photograph supplier. When you commission a website, the digital agency should advise you of this. Photos taken on mobile devices may be suitable for Facebook, Snapchat etc but they are almost certainly not going to cut it on your company website. Photography is a particular skill and they need to not only look professional but the image files themselves need to be optimised so that they load quickly without compromising quality. They should also contain the relevant tags for search engine optimisation. Slow loading images can adversely affect the ranking of your website in the longer term. Your digital agency should advise you of this and you should take their professional advice.

Ensuring Spelling and Grammar are Correct

Everyone makes mistakes, that's a given. But visitors to your website should not find any spelling errors or grammatical mistookes (see what we did there?). Errors indicate a lack of attention to detail and this can adversely affect the customer perception of your business. If you do make a mistake on your website you should correct it as soon as it is discovered. People lose confidence when they see errors in a pre-sale situation and it makes them wonder about the quality of post-sale service. It is important to ensure that what you say and the way you say it is professional at all times. Make sure that all text is proof read and checked, before publishing, for spelling and grammatical errors.