This article will cover everything you need to know about construction website design from modern construction website design through search engine optimization (SEO). Designing a website for your construction business is a top priority in reaching your market. The construction industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world, and construction firms are always looking for new ways to stand out amongst their competition. If you’re a construction firm, it’s important that your website reflects this competitiveness and be designed aligned to best practices and trends. This blog post will cover everything you need to know about construction website design from modern construction website design through search engine optimization (SEO).
Modern Construction Website Design
Your website design should support the purpose of your website. Is it an e-commerce site? Then the website should facilitate driving users to buy. Is it a brochure or informational site? Then the website design should guide people to their desired information easily and effectively.
There are many factors when it comes to website design, from color schemes, to form and function. When designing a website there are many key factors that will contribute to how effective it is in driving users to the end goal of the site. Designing an effective website can help build visitors’ trust and encourage them to take action. Now more than ever, it’s important to create a good user experience on your website, and a clean, modern design that is optimized for easy use is imperative.
The following is a list of best practices that will help you when considering your next website project.
-
Be Minimalistic
Modern sites are not cluttered, but rather employ appropriate white space to allow the eye to be guided to where they should go. Use graphics, full width banners, or other graphical elements to break up the site into logical sections, while still encouraging users to continue scrolling.
-
Full Page Header
Modern websites in the construction space will often use full width banners above the fold (before you have to scroll). Along with these large “hero images” are a clear call to action, typically to the left of the image subject. This is because the human eye (in English speaking countries) naturally wants to start at the top/left. This naturally encourages users to see the call to action and purpose of site right away.
User understanding what the purpose of the site is important as one really only has only a couple of seconds before a user decides if they want to continue into the site, or “bounce” and hit the back button.
-
Gradients Still Trending
Gradients as a design element have been all the rage over the past year or so, and well, they’re still going strong. Gradients, because they incorporate multiple colors, are easy to include in website design, no matter the brand colors.
-
Video
According to Wordstream, 64% of consumers make a purchase after watching branded social videos. That statistic alone should make every brand want to start creating more videos! If you’re not using video as part of your marketing strategy, you’re falling behind.
Construction Website Design Ideas & Best Practices
There are a myriad of construction website design ideas that really make a difference to a website’s effectiveness. Implement these things well, and you can expect your site to score well with Google, boosting your chances or ranking well and garnering good website traffic that can be turned into paying customers. Do these things poorly, and your website could be relegated to the dungeon of Google’s search rankings – never to be found.
See our list of construction website design ideas to implement in your website development:
-
User Experience
User experience, or “UX” for short, is simply a user’s experience & interactions with a company – but particularly online. There are a multitude of factors that go into user experience. Some of the factors that make up a user’s experience are:
- Ease of use
- Relevance of content
- Credibility
- Value
- Accessibility
These things are important because they directly affect the conversion rate of the website. Google is now also including UX in their search algorithm, so websites with good UX will appear higher in search results.
-
Branding
A simple definition of branding is: “A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association).
The power of branding is that you could have two similar products, but the branded product could sell for a much higher price point. Take phones for example. You can buy a new off-brand phone for $300. But Apple sells their phones for $800. Build a brand and see your conversion soar!
-
Focused CTA Above The Fold
“CTA” means Call To Action. On a website, these are typically buttons or elements on the website that users can interact with. They are the actions that you want users to take to lead them to conversion. How you use CTAs is extremely important, with many companies getting it wrong, leading to decreased sales.
“Above the Fold” is a throwback term to the heyday of newspapers. The front page, above the fold of the newspaper is what people see before anything else, and is what makes one buy it and read the story, or not. The same is true for your website. The area on your homepage before users scroll is your front page. This area will either capture user’s attention and cause them to scroll or interact with your CTAs, or hit the back button and leave your site. There are specific ideas to include in your construction website design in order to help this all important area of your website produce results for your business.
-
Webpage Load Times
Webpage load times refers to how much time it takes for your website pages to become usable. If it takes longer than 4 seconds to load a page, users will often leave. Yet, the best sites will load in under 2 seconds! increasingly, if users see load times longer than 2 seconds, they’ll become impatient and leave.
Portent found that “Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).” When a business owner really grasps this, they act quickly to make sure their site is set up in a way that allows for quick load times.
-
Blog / Content Marketing
Content marketing is the key to getting found on the internet. Yet, you must base your content plan on solid SEO research. If you do only one or the other, you run the risk of not maximizing your potential reach. Ask us about how to do this in an effective way!
-
Mobile Friendly
As more people use a variety of devices to browse the web, it is important to design your website using responsive layouts that will work on any screen size. In fact, more people are searching using their phones these days than a desktop. Google also includes how mobile friendly a site is, into their search algorithm. So if your site isn’t mobile friendly/responsive, then Google will push your site down the list of search results.
-
Social Media Integration
Social media has become an important part of many businesses’ marketing strategy. Understanding the data on this point is very important, so you know how much budget to give to this part of your strategy. For some businesses, social marketing is a huge opportunity and to not integrate it into your website would be a mistake.
Yet, for others, they might be surprised how little ROI is actually derived from their social channels. For a construction business, it can actually go either way. Let us help you assess your particular market and give a recommendation.
-
Security
Website security is another area that Google has started to pay close attention to. Basically, if you don’t have an SSL (security certificate) showing that your site is safe to browse, then Google may not show your site at all! Instead, the user will get a message that your site is unsafe – not what you’re wanting when people are searching for you!
-
Off-Page Considerations
Off-page considerations are other websites that could have an impact on your own. Clear examples of this are review sites like Yelp, and also Google Business Listings.
-
Google Business Listing
Google has a way for businesses to list themselves online in order to be found through Google. This is most often associated with “Local SEO”, or local business listings. This proves especially helpful when people speak into their phone and say, “What’s the best construction company in X [city]?” , or “What’s x near me?”. Google will go into their database and if you have a business listing relevant to the users query, could get listed at the top of results.
These queries are especially useful because the user is often looking at buying at that moment. With construction, that may be a little different, but you would still want to make sure that your business is listed with Google.
-
Review Sites
Yelp, Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, and others are often used to see what others’ experience has been with a certain company. It’s important to pay attention to what users have said about your company, and give a response if necessary.
-
Testimonials
Testimonials can be a useful tool to encourage others to use your service. They give credibility to your company and could be the thing to tip the scales toward converting the user into a customer.
-
Tracking & Analytics
The goal of marketing analytics is to optimize return on investment (ROI). In order to do so, you must have baseline knowledge about your marketing performance and a holistic view of its impact. Tracking the metrics themselves isn’t enough; you need context for the data.
Analyzing the data will allow you to put it in context so that you can use it for future marketing guidance. So, market analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data about your marketing strategies to inform future marketing efforts. It also helps increase your return on investment.
Construction Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The acronym ‘SEO’ stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website through search engine results. This could refer to the quantity of traffic and also the quality of traffic.
SEO can increase the quantity of traffic by optimizing your site in certain ways that make it more attractive to Google – ranking it higher in search results. The higher the rank, the more users will click on your website in search results.
SEO can also increase the quality of traffic to your construction website. This matters because the higher the quality of traffic, the more of your target audience is seeing your site. Not all traffic is created equal. So the more your audience is clicking on your website vs users who are not in your target audience, the higher likelihood of them converting into customers.
Your construction website design goes a long way toward increasing your SEO and consequently your conversions.
Conclusion
Your construction website design will either facilitate your website to be an expense, or an asset. It’s an expense if it doesn’t create customers for you, and only costs you money to keep up. It becomes an asset when it starts to generate marketing leads for your business that eventually become customers.
Let us help you design your construction website to be a lead generating machine, creating lasting ROI and sustained sales. Contact us today for a free consultation.