8 Web Design Tips for Manufacturing Companies

Studies have found that over 75% of user impression of your business’s credibility is based on your website design. For businesses looking to grow online, this means having a clunky or out of date website is a sure-fire way to have people leave your site.

There’s more to having a profitable website than just having an eye-catching design. Your site must be strategic. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of your site? To sell your products? To generate leads? Phone calls? Your website can be more than just your digital business card. You need to take a strategic look at what action you want the customer to take when they visit your site.

1. Create a Plan Before You Start

Going in directionless is a surefire way to have a site that is disorganized and confusing from a user stand-point. Imagine you are a customer and start sketching out a vision of a website on paper. With the customer journey in mind when sketching the website, a clear and logical website hierarchy will begin to emerge.

2. Give the Homepage Proper Attention

Make your homepage the face of your business by including some key brand elements such as

• Value Proposition
• Overview of services
• Trust builders like reviews and testimonials

Don’t hide these in the About section or elsewhere since as they are great conversion tools that legitimize your position in the industry

3. Use Calls to Action

A call to action refers to an instruction designed to prompt the user to a specific action. The best way to do this is to think in terms of ‘next-steps’  for visitors on your website. Helpful calls to action on a lead generation form for manufacturing companies use “Start a Project,” “Request a Quote,” or “Contact Us”  to drive to a contact form.

4. Have a Clear Navigation

A clear organized site structure with relevant URLs helps with SEO and creates clear navigation for the user. One way to attract these leads with navigation is by creating a search database for your products. You want to give your leads the ability to look through your products and see if there is anything of interest. It is a great way to keep these people engaged on your page.

5. Optimize for mobile

Mobile is responsible for 52% of all online traffic. Your website needs to be responsive, meaning that the structure, fonts, etc. adjust based on the size of the screen/display. This can be a tricky tip to master so it is best to have web design experts on board to manage this.

6. Address 404s with 301 redirects

If you’re not an expert, be careful with what you delete from your website. Error pages like 404s hurt SEO, so 301 redirects help pass whatever link juice/authority you received from the old page to the new page. Whenever you delete a page, create a 301 redirect to the next most relevant page.

7. Avoid social media links in the header

Many websites have their social media at the top of the page, but if users follow those colorful links, they’ll land on a site full of distractions – and away from your website. Don’t make this mistake by including social media links at the footer, if at all.

8. Use headers and avoid long paragraphs

Copy on your site needs to follow a logical structure. Use headers to accomplish clear navigation.

• • H1 for title/page heading
  • H2 for sectional headings
  • H3, 4 etc to further break up those subheadings

Paragraphs should be 2-3 lines each. Short paragraphs will be read and not skipped over or skimmed as is the case of long blocks of text.