What should I have on my website for an interior design company? Many interior designers are asking this question these days. But why they are interested in the websites in the first place? Well, those days are long gone, when the interior designers and companies reaching out to people with their booklets, brochures and photo albums. These days the digitalization is taking over. Every good designer knows how important the first impression is to close a lead. And your website is your first digital impression and first entry point to your business from the online domain. It is extremely important that you have a strong website that is capable of turning your prospects into leads. In Dubai, UAE another very crucial phenomenon that all local businesses are witnessing is that their audience and customers are preferring to search for them online. Multiple studies and surveys are done in the past few years and the results were suggesting that the influence of online is far greater than ever before and it is even still growing. The interior design companies are no exception. You should understand how the websites work and what you should offer to your visitors from your website to convert them into a legit lead.
The interior designing market is all about colours, layouts, patterns and looks and feels. Does your website reflect that too? Your visitors and prospects will expect the same from your website, they will subconsciously judge you by the visual representation and functionalities of your website. A website is a very strong bond to build trust among the online audiences and customers. It is one of the most effective communication tools but unfortunately, most of the SMEs and local businesses are completely unaware of its importance and potential. This is why we have decided to write this blog and we will elaborate on what you should have on your website if you are operating as an interior designing company in Dubai, UAE.
1. Content
The very first thing you need even before starting a website is a plan and strategy of the content. You should define clearly what content you want to publish on your website. Prepare all the content accordingly and have it in your hand before moving to the web design phase. The content will be all the text, pictures photos and media (videos, animations, graphics, etc). Make a list of all the pages you want and prepare content accordingly. The homepage is the main entry point to your website it is a kind of reception of a physical office for a website. Most of your traffic will land on your homepage. Define other pages such as About Us, Services Pages, Portfolio, Media Library, Contact Us page and or any other page which you think could be helpful in attracting the attention of your customers.
While preparing the content it is very important to make your content short and descriptive, these days no one likes to read multiple paragraphs to understand a point. Utilize visual aids, images, graphics, animations, videos, etc to explain your point. In Dubai, UAE everyone has access to high-speed internet. The general public trend is that people pay more attention to the videos and visual content rather than the textual content. But that doesn’t mean your textual content is not important. It is still the most important part of the content. Use different sales pitches which attract visitors to hit the call-to-action button. Technically speaking the CTA or Call to Action is the act of a prospect converting into a lead. It could be purchase, enquire, signup or anything. In the case of an interior designing company website, the CTA would be most likely contact or enquire or a call back request.
2. Web Design
The website has two major parts, one is the web design or the UX/UI and the other is the backend or the programming or source code. The source code is hidden from the visitor’s eyes and is executed inside the computer and/or server to form a web design. However, the web design is the actual web page we see in the browser. It has to be very intuitive, interactive, appealing and convincing. Interior designing is basically a visual industry and in each visual industry, the designers are well aware of the effects of the designs, colours, patterns and the overall impression. The same rules apply to the web designs as well, although it is a bit more diverse and have certain other things which could help businesses increase their online leads and conversions. Bus the basic remains the same.
For the web design, there are certain rules that if followed ensure a better response from the visitors. In the web design for an interior company website, the homepage has to be very simple, and as your sales pitches are mostly the work you are doing so your homepage has to be able to host multiple services if not all but at least the most important services that you are doing. Do not load your homepage with tons of information and photos. The main landing screen should have a great visual representation of your work and your services along with compelling taglines and sales pitches to encourage the visitors to hit the CTA. For the internal pages, each page should have a unique experience as per the content.
For example, your portfolio is a very important page, usually, the interior designing companies website don’t pay much attention to the portfolio page. Mostly web designs only show a large image gallery with only functionality to Zoom or Full-Screen image. It is important you put basic information of the project along with the images too. This not only encourages the visitors but also builds trust. The same applies to other internal pages, pay more attention to the service pages and at least design one page for each service. The contact us page is also important, do not ask for tons of information in the contact forms or other forms. Just the basic information is enough. Include your location map and complete contact details. The web design is the only touchpoint where a visitor interacts with a business hence has to be made with the attentions to convert that visitor into a lead.
3. Responsive and Smartphone Compatibility
These days mobile phones have become essential to daily life. People spend more time on their smartphones and smart gadgets than on conventional computers and laptops. Most internet searches are made from smartphones. It is a general understanding now among marketers that smartphones are more capable than traditional computer or laptop. Mostly the social media is used in smartphones, more searches are made from smartphones, and all sort of industries are utilizing the enormous potential of smartphones and innovating new ideas to utilize them in boosting efficiency and convenience. Being a local business or even a national business in the interior designing industry it is vital to have a smartphone-enabled website. When people notice a website that is not mobile-friendly or doesn’t support smartphones, they tend to avoid it even while searching from the computer or laptop. This is why these days smartphone compatibility which is more often called responsiveness is very critical and important for an interior designing company in Dubai, UAE.
A responsive website is one that is capable of detecting the device from where it is being accessed and then automatically render its design as per the screen size and other parameters of the device. This all happens in less than a second, in fact, it takes only a fraction of a second. The great advantage of a responsive web design is that it maintains a similar user experience in all devices which is important because if a user has accessed your website from their laptop and later they are accessing it from their smartphone they would expect the same elements on the same places, which is very important to build a user experience. The visitors’ expectations are always high, and they have tens of hundreds of other options just a few clicks away. So, it is important to capture their attention when they first land on your website or any web page. Else they will move to one of your competitors.
4. Dynamic Website & CMS
What is a dynamic website? The dynamic website is the website that provides a content management system or CMS such as PHP Framework, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any other framework. This CMS is used to manage and update the content of a website. It is very important to constantly publish new content and keep the information up-to-date on an interior company website. The Dynamic Website comes with a content publishing tool which we call a CMS or content management system. It has an online dashboard and allows the administrator or the management to access the control panel online. Whenever you want to publish new photos in the media library or want to upload a new project and simply want to edit any information on the website you can do it quickly and easily from the CMS. This is the modern industry standard.
Earlier there were two types of websites, the static and the dynamics. The market was dominated by the static website because the companies and organizations were not using them for the purposes they are currently being used for. Now a day if you want a static website you must have to have a website programmer who can update the website content and information. As the static websites can only be updated by writing or editing the source code. Which requires sufficient professional and technical skills. If you go with a static website, either you have to hire a website programmer in-house or you will have to outsource this work, which will add up to the operational cost. So, the best approach is always a dynamic website for interior designing companies as they will require continuous updates and uploads on their websites. And it is more cost-effective in terms of operational cost.
5. Load Time
The load time is the time a website or a webpage takes to get a load from the server to the client/browser. As the interior designing company’s website has more than usual images and graphics so the load time could go higher. But from the user perspective, high load time is very bad and visitors often leave a webpage if it takes too long to get load. So it is very crucial to optimize the load time for an interior designing company website. There are so many different methods and techniques that website developers use to reduce the load time. These details are all very technical so I will just list them here:
- Reduce HTTP Requests
- Combine Multiple Source Code Files
- Minify the Source Code
- Create Sub-Domains to Load Different Source Code Files and Multimedia in Parallel
- Optimize the Pictures and Photos
- Use Small Photos for Thumbnails and Load Large After the Zoom Button is Clicked
- Use SVGs instead of PNGs and JPGs for Design Elements
- Draw Patterns and Backgrounds using CSS as much as Possible
- Built the theme in a way that it loads content on the scroll
- Use Appropriate Web Hosting
Of course, the list goes on, but these are the major key player in the load time optimizations. If these things are considered while the development and commissioning of the website the load time can be reduced significantly.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is very important these days. If you want to build a good brand reputation you should make sure that your website appears in the first results of the search page. If you want to reduce your digital marketing expenses, you need organic traffic which comes from search engine optimization. SEO has evolved a lot, and only professional web designers and web developers can understand its importance and can build websites that are ‘SEO Friendly’. Your every service is your keyword and relevant terms that people use in the search engine to look up for those services are your keywords, these keywords should be added in the content on the website and in the source code, they should be added with the right attributes. Similarly, the design should also highlight them clearly.
The search engine and social media and many other data scrappers read those keywords, evaluate their repetition rate and their prominence and then rate a page for those keywords, similarly, they associate certain pages of your website with certain keywords. This is the very basis of the SEO of course there are a lot many other things but it is critical that your website’s design and source code structure is search engine friendly and it let them read the content easily. This will automatically increase your ranks in the search results and will divert a vast amount of free organic traffic which will not only reduce your digital marketing cost but will drive more leads and conversions.
Conclusion
The interior design company or any other local business heavily rely on online traffic these days in Dubai, UAE. In order to maintain a steady stream of online organic web traffic, you should have a great website. And it should be great enough to convert your prospects into leads. As is with any other visual industry the looks and feels are the most important and the first impression is very critical, the interior designing industry is not an exception. Your website is your very first interaction with a very large audience, make sure they convert. Pay attention to the content, design, images and every minute detail possible to build up a user experience that compels the visitors to click on your CTA. Consider the loading time and page speed as well.
Make sure your website abide by all the standards and rules of the search engines so that you can get higher ranks in the searches. These days in Dubai, UAE the general population is very much relying on their smartphones, the smartphone searches have already surpassed the traditional computers and laptops. This makes it extremely important that your website is not only SEO friendly but it is also smartphone compatible or responsive. Your website is basically the foundation of your digital marketing campaign and activities. It has the potential to determine the failure or success of an interior design company.
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