Web Design Melbourne

No matter what form any piece of technology takes, the higher the standard it has built to, the more chance there is of it working properly and the less chance there is of it failing or breaking down. This principle applies as much to cars, washing machines, and computers as it does to websites.

You might think that as there are no moving parts, how can a website ‘break down’? But you have to remember it does have coding, programming, plugins, and other design elements. Whilst they are on a website, visitors may have some interactions with it, which may also rely upon some of the programming used to build a website.

If any of the programming or coding which you might consider ‘under the bonnet’, does not work properly or fails intermittently, those visiting the website are bound to encounter those flaws and faults. This can mean the website loads slowly, pages fail to open, the graphics and text look strange, and there may even be error messages that appear on the user’s screen.

We live in a fast-paced world, and nowhere is that more prevalent than online. People are not going to sit around and wait for a slow-loading website, nor are they going to endure errors. Instead, they will go elsewhere because to do so, they need to simply click another tab on their browser.

That is how quickly you can lose a prospect, or more to the point, how quickly one of your competitors can gain that prospect due to your website not functioning properly.

But it need not be like that. A professionally designed website from Slinky Web Design will be built by professional programmers who are experts in ensuring that the functionality of a website is as it should be. They will also thoroughly test your new website to ensure everything is working correctly.

Your Website Will Be Less Vulnerable To Hacking And Malware Attacks

You are no doubt well aware that not everyone who operates online has good intentions, and that means that there is a criminal element who seeks to make gains using underhand and, in most cases, illegal means. Much of the publicity surrounding their activities tends to be when they manage to hack the websites of larger companies and organizations and steal the personal data of individuals.

However, smaller and local businesses, including those here in Melbourne, should be under no illusion that just because you might not have the data of millions of people stored on your website’s servers, you might not be a target. Hackers operate at all levels, and they are just as likely to send malware to your website to disable it and demand a few thousand dollars to release it.

The older your website is, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and it is for this reason many clients come to Slinky Web Design to ask us to build them a new, more secure website. Now, we must stress, given the complexity of some hacking malware, that no website can ever be 100% protected, but the modern programming we would use to build it will ensure that your website is not an easy target.

Beyond this, we also offer an additional service that provides even greater protection, including the monitoring and testing of your website for malware attacks, so if security is a concern, please speak to us.

Whilst the internet might be considered the biggest leap with respect to how recent technological advances have changed our lives, there is also a case to be made that mobile and other smart devices have made every bit of a difference. When the internet first became popular, it could usually only be accessed via desktop computers, but all that has changed in the past 20 years or so.

With mobile phone technology making huge leaps and bounds, what could once only be done whilst sitting at a desk and using a PC can now be done on a device that is held in your hand and is no more than a couple of inches wide. The term smart device is often used to describe a mobile phone for the simple reason that the fact they can be used to make and receive phone calls now seems inconsequential.

We may make calls on them, but mobile phones are now more like mini-computers, and of course, they can easily connect to the internet. That means anyone in Melbourne who has a mobile device with internet access can visit your business’s website, and their experience when doing so will only be optimized if that website is mobile device compatible. If it is not mobile-compatible, your website might not load or look right.

Every website designed and built by Slinky Web Design Melbourne is mobile compatible, and as part of our testing procedures, we make doubly sure that all the pages of your new website load and display as they should on all devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and of course mobile and other smart devices.

Branding for businesses can take many forms, from a simple company logo at one end of the scale to a company’s entire business model being founded upon the strength of its brand and, in some cases, more than on its products. For most businesses in Melbourne, their branding will not need to be on the same scale as the likes of Nike or Disney, but it can play a significant role in their success.

Effective branding can make your company recognizable to Melbourne, and when the time comes that any one of them is the market for the goods or services you provide, then you are far more likely to be one of the companies they consider if they are aware of your branding.

Slinky Web Design can help strengthen your brand within the design of your new website by ensuring that the colors we use are consistent, that any fonts associated with that brand are used, that we include your logo where appropriate, and that each page reinforces your branding, be that with words or with imagery.

There is a commodity that many businesses possess that if you asked their owner to swap it for a suitcase full of gold, they would point blank and refuse to. That commodity is not their premises, their trademarks, or even their product blueprints. It is in fact the trust that they have built amongst their customers, clients, and within their local marketplace.

Trust is so valuable to a business when it exists because if they were ever to lose that trust from people, such is the impact of that,it might even mean that the business struggles to survive. The other element is that trust is not something that occurs overnight and is instead something that builds and grows over time. However, whilst it may not occur instantly, it can certainly be lost in an instant.

When Slinky Web Design builds a website for a client, we will seek to include elements within it that lend themselves to gaining trust from anyone who visits that website, and we will certainly ensure that nothing within the design could in any way cause a visitor to mistrust that client’s business.

The first impression someone has when they land on your website can influence how much they trust you, so we make sure the appearance is professional and clean. We also refrain from spammy elements like pop-ups that are difficult to close or flashing graphics that are little more than a distraction.

We can also include graphical elements that confirm you are a trustworthy and reputable company, such as the logo of a professional body you belong to or membership of your respective local trade association.

Assuming you are a business that operates in and around the city of Melbourne, then it follows that the vast majority of your prospective customers and clients are residents of Melbourne. Now Melbourne, just as those who live in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, or any other city, will first and foremost seek out a local company long before they look elsewhere.

This fact means that it is beholden upon any business to ensure that when a local resident visits their website, it is abundantly clear that the company that owns that website is a local one, and in this case, that it is a company with a very strong association with Melbourne.

That local loyalty can be harnessed by a business within its website, and when Slinky Web Design Melbourne is designing your website, we will make sure that there is no doubt you are a Melbourne business.

This can take many forms, but in the main, we may have your Melbourne address, a map showing your location within Melbourne, testimonials from clients based in Melbourne, and even some images of Melbourne landmarks that local residents will instantly recognize.

Whilst some businesses focus on marketing offline, given the huge importance of the internet today, the vast majority of businesses market online. The goal of much of that marketing will be to drive traffic to the company’s website, where prospects might complete a quotation request, enter their email for more information, or, if it is an eCommerce website, possibly make a purchase.

The critical factor in all of this is that if the website that the traffic is being sent to is substandard, is poorly designed, and has technical issues, all the marketing work and expense will have been for nothing. An offline equivalent would be seeing a newspaper ad for a nearby restaurant, and when you get there, you find the paintwork is peeling, the windows are filthy, the cutlery is grubby, and half the menu is not available.

Regardless of the marketing methods you use and how much or how little you spend on online marketing, all of it will be a complete waste if the destination for the traffic lets you down. That is why a website built for you by Slinky Web Design will make the difference because then any visitor arriving via one of your marketing efforts is going to see a well-designed website, and one more likely to induce them to take action.

There are lots of reasons why you would want to make sure that any visitor who lands on your website has the best possible user experience possible, as it is likely to lead them to take some kind of positive action that benefits your business. In no particular order, these include:

Each one of these positive actions either benefits your business with respect to building its trust and reputation or takes that visitor closer to making a purchase, notwithstanding the fact that on some websites, if their experience is that good, they might actually do that on their first visit.

Of course, none of these will be possible if, instead of having a great experience on your website, they experience the opposite due to slow load time, page errors, and a website that looks hideous. Only a professionally designed website will provide visitors with the experience they would, and with our design professionals, Slinky Web Design websites achieve exactly that.

If there is one thing you need to know about the #1 search engine, Google is that they are absolutely committed to remaining at the top of the pile. Given that they receive 70% of all search traffic, there does not seem much danger of them being toppled any time soon, but that does not stop them from striving to extend their lead over the other search engines.

Google has determined that the reason they have got to ‘numero uno’, and the way in which they will stay there is with the results that they generate whenever someone enters a search being the most relevant and also the highest quality. Note that those ‘results’ are all links to individual pages of websites, albeit many are for home pages.

This tells us that unless a website and the pages within that website are relevant to the subject at hand and are also of the highest quality, then Google’s algorithm, which ranks websites, will not be minded to promote it and may even demote it lower down those rankings.

You should be aware that Google monitors what happens whenever someone clicks from its search results to determine if the website they are clicking through meets its relevance and quality objectives. Simple data such as how long someone remains on the website or how quickly they click away are both measures that tell Google whether to enhance or diminish the ranking of that website.

So, how do you ensure visitors do not click away immediately and stay for a reasonable length of time on your website? The answer is having a site that they would want to spend some time on. That will be a website that looks excellent, works properly, loads quickly, has lots of excellent content, is easy to navigate, and projects the company that owns that website as professional and trustworthy.

In the section about user experience, we listed a number of actions that a visitor might take if the experience they have whilst visiting your website is a positive one. What we did not mention, though, is that the chances of them happening or of any other kind of action you wish someone to take whilst they are on your website will increase greatly if your website looks great and functions well.

If you think about any time that you yourself have been on a website, any action that you are being asked to take, from the simplest such as entering your email address, to the more complicated, like completing forms that run into four or five pages, you will always be more inclined to do so if you have confidence in the website, and more especially, the company that owns that website.

A poor website that does not instill any confidence by association, makes it more difficult to have any confidence in the company that owns it and, presumably, has its name at the top of that website.

Any website is only worth having if it moves people landing on it from casual browsers towards becoming customers. That journey will have many and differing steps depending on the specific business, but whichever type they are, with a website designed and built by Slinky Web Design, those next steps have an infinitely higher chance of taking place.

Whichever business sector or marketplace you are in, your business is almost certainly going to have competition from other companies who sell similar products and services to yours. There are lots of ways you can try to beat your competition such as having superior products, better customer service, lower prices, and better marketing, to name but four.

Each of these can help, and if you add to the mix a high-quality, professionally designed website, then the chances of beating companies in Melbourne whom you compete with are greatly improved. As you have already been reading, a professionally designed website from Slinky Web Design will produce a long list of benefits for your business, all of which help it to advance.

Need a reminder of them all?

Impressive, don’t you agree? With all of these benefits helping to push your business forward, thanks to your new website you will not just be outperforming your competition, you will be crushing them, and that is before we even get to what most of Slinky Web Design’s clients tell us is the best benefit of all!

This should really be the section with the most amount of words but given that increasing revenue and profits is what every business owner and CEO is trying to achieve, we are sure you are well aware of its significance to you and your business.

We also hope that by now you can see that all the benefits we have explained in some detail, which flow from having a professionally designed website, will contribute hugely to your business, seeing its revenues increase and its profits rise.

Of course, none of these is likely to happen, including greater revenue and profits, if the website that represents your business online is not up to the job. In fact, a poor website can do worse and actually take your business backward, so please seriously assess what your current website contributes in terms of profits, and if it falls short, then the time is now to have a new website professionally designed for your business.