Louise Urquhart
“You guys are great, but your website’s shocking.”
Many building product manufacturers come to us having experienced this feedback from their Customers. You’ve spent years building up a positive reputation within your space, but your website hasn’t been changed since the 90s and it’s in need of some serious TLC. In short, it’s letting you down. It’s stopping you from winning those bigger and better projects.
A website redesign isn’t a simple process. It’s an investment in your time and your money. So, before parting ways with your hard-earned cash, we’ve put together 6 design essentials that your building product website needs in order to thrive.
Similarly, if you’ve recently undergone a website re-design but it’s not quite generating that ROI, use this post as a checklist to see if it’s ticking all the boxes.
Read on…
#1 Clear & Consistent Branding
If your business is a body, then your website is the heart. It’s the place that should cleverly highlight your Value Proposition (VP) and your Unique Perceived Benefits (UPBs). It’s the place that represents your brand values.
One of the most effective ways to do this is by establishing a clear colour palette. It sounds simple, yet it’s something that is so often overlooked. You should have a selection of key colours that you use consistently throughout your site. This will deliver a cohesive and identifiable image of your company.
Top tip: use a contrasting colour for your website’s calls to action (CTAs) and buttons in order for them to be seen easily.
The aim should be for someone to identify your brand without even needing to see your logo.
#2 High Quality Imagery
Photography plays a vital role in your building product website’s brand perception.
And if you don’t have high-quality imagery, us website designers will have a hard time trying to make your site look good. We may even have to opt for…gasp… cheesy stock imagery. This should be avoided if you can help it.
Sadly, iPhone images won’t cut it. Remember, these images will be displayed on a multitude of screen sizes, so photography that’s been taken on a good quality digital camera is your safest option.
We often visit our clients and take professional images of their factory and manufacturing process. We’ve even been known to travel to site locations!
So, next time you win a big project, it’s definitely worth investing in some photography to capture your workmanship.
#3 A Website That Can Evolve With You
Gone are the days when you could get a new website and ignore it for the next ten to fifteen years.
If you want to secure your digital footprint, you need a website that evolves with you. That means paying close attention to how users are engaging with your site and making tweaks as you go along.
Constantly updating your content and evaluating your user experience will ensure that your website evolves with you, as opposed to one that collects dust on a virtual bookshelf.
Top tip: Don’t choose a design agency that builds your site in a way that makes it impossible for you to log in and make simple changes yourself.
#4 A Website That Gets You Found
A website that looks great is only the icing on the web cake, whereas SEO is the sponge. In fact, SEO is up there as one of the contributing factors to a website’s success.
It’s crucial that you set up your Google Analytics tracking code and paste it into the header of your website. This will allow you to measure key metrics such as page views, bounce rates, traffic sources and much more.
Once your GA is set up, do your keyword research. You should establish the keywords that you want to be found for online and use them strategically on your website’s URLs, headers, copy, image alt. tags and image names.
And input meta descriptions and page titles with relevant keywords on every page, so that people searching on Google are confronted with a well-considered description of the website page they’ve found.
A consistent, SEO-driven content strategy is key to getting your building product website found online.
#5 Easy On-Site Navigation
You don’t need us to tell you how annoying it is when you can’t find what you need from a website.
If this is the case with your website, you should expect high bounce rates and severely low levels of engagement.
Website navigation should be at the forefront of the design process. You should carefully plan out what information should be on each page and your web designer should use “wireframes” to show which elements need to appear where on a page.
As a rule of thumb, all pages should be accessible within 1 or 2 clicks.
If you have a much broader product selection, you may benefit from a “mega menu” so that most product categories are reachable in one click.
Top tip: Also make use of footer navigation, CTAs and internal linking further down your page. This will ensure that no matter where your User is, they can find their way to the info they need.
#6 A One-Stop-Shop For Specifiers To Find The Info They Need
And last but by no means least, your website should serve up the right information to your specifiers at the right time to enable them to do their job easier (and better).
Whether that’s technical drawings, BIM objects, datasheets… the list goes on (and will invariably change depending on your specific offering), if specifiers can’t access the technical resources they need, they will look elsewhere.
So, whether it’s a ‘technical hub’ or a ‘downloads’ section, this shouldn’t be overlooked during your building product’s website design.
Conclusion
Choosing to undergo a website redesign is a challenge and one that will almost always require you to outsource.
If you’d like to learn more about Insynth’s unique process for creating high-quality building product websites that are designed to act as your “extra salesperson”, we’d love to hear from you.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.