User experience designers have said it for years; you are only one bad user experience away from a PR catastrophe. The reason for this is that web visitors – or users as they are referred to by designers – consider that the way they navigate your website to find information, to pay, to get in touch with your business and to order or book – depending on the offering you have – is an integral part of your branding strategy.
Image Source:Â Dinoh11483 at English Wikipedia
In short, they look beyond the choice of logo and colors to focus on how accessible and friendly your brand is making the digital journey for them.
How unfair as it might sound, it is time to accept that the digital revolution has given a new meaning to brand strategy.
The interactions that your visitors have with your website will now define how they feel about your brand and whether they are likely to renew their purchase with you. So what are the key digital elements of your branding strategy?
A Trustworthy Website
Everyone is used to browsing the Internet and looking at a variety of websites.
As a result, people have developed a form of first digital impression routine that they use to judge whether they can trust a website or not. For instance, the absence of an about us page is frowned upon by visitors, who are likely to assume that the business is a scam.
Additionally, old-fashioned websites that are not offering a responsive design are not taken seriously, as it is expected for a website to use modern layout and digital accessibility.
Last, but not least, the absence of a domain name, whether you are using a wordpress.com hosting solution or pretending than the eBay page is your website, is considered a digital sin.
Users will tend to stay away from interactions with websites that don’t display any trustworthy elements.
A User-Friendly Website
In the world of online presence – which is what a website offers – visitors are very sensitive to error messages.
404 error codes, also known as the not found page, are perceived as a lack of care from the business’s side.
As most visitors expect links to function on a website, they tend to leave if they come across a 404 error code.
Additionally, 500 error codes are server errors and happen when the server is overloaded. As a result, the website can’t load.
To avoid websites throwing server errors during peak times, it is recommended to work with virtual private servers, such as Windows VPS, that runs additional virtual servers during peak times to handle the traffic volume.
As a rule of the thumb, visitors don’t want their experience with the website to be interrupted by errors that are the responsibility of the business.
An Engaging Story-Telling
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As digital technology evolves, the interactions with a website have moved away from a series of mouse clicks along the menu bar.
Nowadays it is about engaging at an emotional level with the web users to create a lasting impression.
This requires not only high-quality designing skills but also a story-telling talent that can place the visitor directly at the center of your business story.
Adidas Design Studio, for example, is the part of the Adidas brand that takes the visitor on a journey through the creation of iconic models.
The page evokes creativity, passion, curiosity, and manages to build an emotional bond with the brand.
As a career page, it is ideal to bring potential applicants directly at the heart of the creative studios.
