7 Things That Will Make Your Website Stand Out /
As of 24th February 2021, there were an astonishing 1,197,982,359 websites in the world, all vying for your attention and the attention of your competitors. It goes without saying that that is a huge amount of competition!
Equestrian businesses are lucky in that the uptake of technology has been somewhat slow when compared to other industries and as a result it has been easier to see growth following simple SEO implementation and basic website designs. However, our industry is now quickly catching up. For equestrian entrepreneurs, business owners and athletes, this means that you are increasingly likely to go toe-to-toe with a quickly growing number of equine businesses similar to yourself, competing to gain customers through an online presence.
As web design continues to evolve and the businesses offering the best customer experience generally walking off victorious, here are 7 things you can do to make your website stand out from the herd to attract your ideal customers!
Cohesive Branding /
Due to the importance of branding, we require our clients to have their branding set up and fine tuned prior to any web design projects. That’s how important it is! You will have heard that an image tells a thousand words? Well, so does your branding.
Branding is absolutely critical to any equestrian business because of the overall impact it has on your company: It is there to establish how people perceive your brand, drive new business and increase brand awareness. A strongly established brand will increase a business’ value by giving the company more leverage in the industry and ultimately make it more appealing for other businesses to be associated with.
When we work on branding projects with our clients, we focus on logo development (including alternate logos and submarks), a colour palette and fonts. Curious about this topic? You can read more about our branding packages here.
Content is King /
As with anything else: It is all about quality over quantity when you add content to your site.
Producing quality content is playing an increasingly important part in getting your site up the search rankings. Also considered here is legibility (ie. how easy it is to read the text on your images and chosen background colour), which search engines like Google will take into consideration.
Compelling copy matters as much as your images, and the tone of voice you establish throughout your site is also what dictates your tone of voice in other marketing efforts. If you are looking for copywriters, we would recommend UK based Emily from Ink Pot and Press. We also work closely with a specialist equestrian and veterinary translation agency, and can assist you with your needs for a multilingual websites and any associated marketing content.
Photo: Filip Gustafsson
It’s all About the Images /
Alongside cohesive branding and textual content, your website is only as good as the images you use.
All photos need to look part of your brand aesthetics whilst they also appeal to your target audience. We would recommend hiring a professional photographer for all product and personal brand photography, and have collected a list of photographers both in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia, the USA and Australia. Just let us know if you would like us to put you in contact with someone, we would love to help.
For service based businesses who do not operate as a personal brand it can be hard to display on-brand images when you’re not the subject of your business. Don’t despair - We are working on a guide on how to chose and edit stock images for your website to suit your branding. Hit the button in our footer and subscribe to our newsletter to learn when the guide goes live!
Engaging Layouts /
The most common fault we see on DIY websites is that there are big blocks of text and no intriguing layouts to the pages. This poses an issues as big chunks of uninterrupted content is hard to digest, which in turn increases the chance of visitors leaving your site shortly after landing on it.
Try to break text and other content into columns and increase the amount of ‘white space’ on your pages.
Another way to make your site engaging for visitors is to add elements of movement through animation. Most websites are still static, and whilst video backgrounds are great they will generally not load on mobile devices. Animated elements, on the other hand, will! If you struggle with creating elements of code which will help achieve that animated effect, we suggest that you:
If you have limited graphic design experience, you can create an animation in an easy-to-use graphic design tool such as Canva (make sure they’re not big files as this will slow down your page loading time)
Utilise the various animated effects your website builder can offer. We build all our client’s sites on Squarespace, a platform which makes this very easy! You can easily add animation to all content or only images, it is entirely up to you. It won’t have an effect on your loading time either!
Social Proof /
You might have already read our post on how you can use social proof as part of your marketing to elevate your sales. This applies to your website too! If you want your brand to stay competitive in your market, attract new consumers and turn interested prospects into paying customers, adding social proof throughout your customer journey is the best way to do this.
There are numerous ways in which you can showcase testimonials from clients, case studies and so on. The below is an image of how we display social proof on our home page by highlighting our industry experience and brands we have worked with. We also have a testimonials page on our site.
Responsiveness /
If there is one thing we stress time and time again, it’s the importance of optimising your site for mobile devices. As of March 2021, Google stopped indexing the desktop version of your site. This comes as a direct result of most traffic being generated through portable devices such as mobiles and tablets these days (over 50% to be specific!). In fact, Google report that 72% of consumers expect brands to have mobile-friendly sites but a staggering 96% have been to sites that weren't mobile-ready! For you, this means that the site you so lovingly created to be seen on desktops will most likely be mainly visited by mobile devices and as a result won’t perform as well unless you paid attention to it.
Even on website builders such as Squarespace, which will automatically create a responsive version of your site, there are things you should do to prime your pages for optimised experience for visitors on mobile devices. If you have questions about how to optimise your site for mobile or would like us to check it’s mobile functionality for you, get in touch!
Invest in an innovative designer /
It is becoming increasingly easy to take website design into your own hands using the likes of Squarespace or Wordpress, but we would like to urge you to proceed with caution: You’ll largely be using templates your competitors will already be using, but you have one chance and less than 5 seconds to make an impact on your visitors, so getting it right from the start is important.
Consider the time and effort you will spend building a site if you have little to know prior knowledge of website design, and then remind yourself of the fact that time is money. The design aspect of any site build is the fun part, but what about all the behind-the-scenes things that you will have to spend additional time researching and redoing?
We dare say that a good website designer is worth their weight in gold! The money won’t only be well spent, but it will add up to less than the time you would spend doing it yourself. And the end result? A website not only set apart from your competitors aesthetically, but one that is also SEO-optimised, responsive, on-brand and user-friendly.
