Should you be spending your money on web design, or digital marketing? Or even both? What can each of these aspects of the online world do for your business? Below are three starting-point tips to explain what you need to focus on to grow your business.

Web Design is the process of planning and building a website that will increase conversion of visitors to leads. Digital Marketing involves implementing strategies to improve the reach of your content and drive traffic to your website and social media channels.

When you start your website building journey, it can be hard to know where to start. Let's assume you've employed a web design team to build your site - what's next? What do they need to get started? As a web design company, INCUB8 are starting new web projects all the time. The following list are the most important things that we need to know from our clients before we start building.

If you have contracted a web designer, or web design company, to build a website for yourself or your business, there will come a point in the process (or possibly several points) when they ask you for feedback. This can be a daunting task if you’re not used to evaluating websites! But you don’t have to be a pro to give relevant, constructive feedback. Use the following tips to help you out!

1. Start with colour

The first thing a person (i.e. prospective customer) is going to notice when your webpage first loads are the colours, which will immediately evoke specific emotions – this means that your colour palette is so important! What is your initial gut reaction when seeing the mixture of colours the web designer has used for your site? Do they make you feel happy? Confused? Are they professional or fun? Do they convey what you’re hoping to achieve, and do they match your brand? Is there too much, or to little? Your instincts will help you out here – don’t ignore them.

Think about how you use Google. Are you on the couch at night using your phone or tablet? Or is it during your lunch break at work? Or how about when you're trying to solve a problem? Most of the time, it's when we don't have time, and that impacts our browsing behaviour.

After clicking on a search result in Google, how long do you wait for the website to load? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? Keep that answer in mind...

Now, have you tested how long your business website takes to load? How does that compare with how long you are willing to wait for someone else's site when your time is critical? 

1. It’s Loading Slowly

If a potential customer or client clicks on a link to your website and it loads slowly, chances are they’re going to leave again, really fast. If you have an ecommerce website that takes longer than 5 seconds to load, users will get frustrated. There’s a whole host of things that INCUB8 can help you do to optimise your page speed.

Visit Page Speed Insights to check your website speed, and contact us today if you need help!

INCUB8 have had the pleasure of working with some amazing clients recently, and we are proud of what we have achieved alongside these businesses.

Something that we have been building more of lately are membership websites – sites that not only require generic pages for the general public to access, such as Home, About Us and Contact, but also a custom-built section for potential members to sign-up, and for current members to log in and use for specific purposes.

At INCUB8, these sites are built using Wordpress and a variety of plugins, particularly the WooCommerce and MembershipWorks platforms.

We won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty, but using these tools allow us to build a site that fully meets the needs of our clients, and their members.

Let us take you through an example.