Tacoma Web Design Company
Web Design that
Makes An Impact
We are a web design company serving Tacoma, Seattle and national businesses, startups and e-commerce.
Inspire confidence. Win new customers. Play to your strengths. A strong, modern website shows the world you've arrived.
Choose your customers. Smart, targeted marketing gets your website in front of the right people.
Your logo and brand show clients, customers and partners who you are. Tell your story, build your culture, and showcase your strengths.
We Believe
Your website tells the world who you are. We believe every founder, business owner and entrepreneur deserves to look world class online.
We believe in empowering creative people and marketers to tell their stories, with flexible tools that put them in the driver's seat.
We believe your brand experience begins before customers ever arrive on your website -- on the first page of search engine results. That you need to show up there, grab attention, reel'em in, and give them a reason to care. Great design and customer-centric messaging shows your prospects that you care about them.
Our commitment is to help you find your voice. Define your vision and bring it to life online. The great brands do this. We can help you do it.
“I am thrilled with our new website! It has rocketed us to the top of the Google results.”
Essential Elements of Tacoma Web Design
Your Tacoma business website is one of the earliest touchpoints people have with your brand. It’s also where amazing first impressions are made—or lost. If your site doesn’t have the necessary elements, there’s an extremely good chance that the user is going to leave your site and click over to the competition.
Responsive website design best practices have evolved a long way over the years. Elements such as professionally written persuasive content and a modern, aesthetically-pleasing design are just a few of the things you’ll need to make a great impression on your website visitors.
Read on to learn more about great design, strong branding, SEO, and other interactive elements that we use to inspire trust and action on your homepage.
Home Page Hook
The First Impression
Many studies have shown how difficult it is for someone to shake their first impression of a brand. People will often equate the quality of your products or services with the quality of your website.
Other studies have shown that you have around a second to “hook” and capture someone’s attention before they hit the back button on their web browser or close the tab an go back to the search results. That’s just about enough time to absorb the first visual graphic and read 5-7 words.
So taking control of that first impression is critically impotant. The design of the home page of your website has to create an amazing first impression in less than a second, and it needs to be more captivating and “sticky” than your competitors’.
At Bizango, we create websites that differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. If a prospective client has three web browser tabs open, it’s our job to give them reasons to keep yours and “X” out the others.
That encompasses identifying and explaining (visually, in the layout, graphic, design and flow of the page as well as in the text) what it is that you and your business are uniquely great at doing. Your Unique Selling Proposition. The things that set you apart.
Once we’ve determined that, we sit down to collaborate on how to visually represent this so that it CLEARLY conveys this message in under 1 second.
Clickers & Scrollers
There are two different types of people who browse websites—those that can’t wait around and are looking for something to click on; and slower, more in-depth readers who scroll down to see what else you have to say (but only if they sense it's going to be worth their while).
So after we’ve hooked ‘em with an amazing visual and rock-solid persuasive message above, we offer something to appease both groups:
Scrollers—will find a compelling and engaging story below…
Clickers—clear navigation and a strong call-to-action big enough to command attention but not feel overly salesy to scrollers.
Some of the most important home page elements include:
- Images
- Content (Copy)
- Design
- Color scheme
- Overall flow
- Typography
- The Promise, Offer, and Benefits Elements
The Promise
What exactly are you offering?
Once we’ve grabbed the website visitor’s attention in the first second that they’re on your website, we quickly identify your company and your offerings. At this point, we bring it down to earth quickly because people are still impatient.
We let them know who you are and what you do. And we do it fast, using the same words they do (the same words they type into Google). The Promise element of a website is also where we add the SEO keywords that the search engines will pick up and use to rank your site organically. However, we don’t overdo it as there is a fine line between SEO optimization and what the search engines consider “keyword spam.”
The Offer element of your website is just that. A place where we tell your visitors exactly what it is that you offer. For example:
We are a Tacoma web design company with a proven 15-year track record of building aesthetically pleasing and persuasive websites that allow our clients to drive new leads and business through their front door.
That leaves little room for doubt as to who Bizango is or what we do. If we caught the visitor’s interest with that hook, there’s an extremely good chance that they will continue scrolling down to learn more about web design in Tacoma.
The Benefits
The Benefits element explains what you do best, and how it's different. What are the benefits of hiring your Tacoma company? Why should someone work with you over your competitors?
When it comes to describing your benefits, it’s important to keep this section short and to the point. Otherwise, it comes off as very salesy, and you risk losing the reader's attention. Short, skimmable sentences and bullet points fit the bill perfectly.
We usually choose three. Why? Because three is the magic number, obviously.
The Story
With the first part of the homepage, we’ve caught their attention, and bought some time. That was the lightning strike. The hook. So what do we do with this engagement? What do we say to them?
The Story element of a website is where we can tell your visitors a thing or two about you or your company. Something that’s interesting. That highlights a difference in you approach, or will cause people to care. A unique aspect of your process, or secret ingredient.
We’ve set the hook, now let’s start reeling them in.
Two methods work equally well. The first is to showcase a unique approach (assuming it’s unique) or show them your suite of services.
The second method is to tell a compelling foundational story or why you and your company exist. They, too, must be fairly unique or unusual to work well.
It’s important to avoid overused cliches, such as “We truly care about the client/customer relationship and quality of our work.” If your site visitors had a nickel for every time they read that on your competitors’ websites…
The Proof
The internet is a scary place. Why should visitors trust you?
“The problem with internet claims is that you cannot always depend on their accuracy.”
― Abraham Lincoln 1864
Chances are your site visitors are a savvy bunch. They’ve seen many different websites and have been promised the world over the years. The problem is that they’ve been let down far too many times to believe things they read on the internet at face value.
You have to first show proof before you can build trust. That comes in many forms, such as:
- Client testimonials
- Awards
- Reviews (Google, Yelp, etc.)
- Memberships in known associations
If you don’t have actual proof, we can always use your founder’s message as a last resort. Putting a face on you company helps them know you’re real, and is a form of proof.
(And get use a photo of yourself that will inspire trust!)
How to Build Trust
When people first come to your website, they don't know you. They may have clicked on an ad, found your site in a Google search, or clicked on a link someone sent them in an email.
The proof section of your website is where we build trust. Peer review is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. People trust friends and family members—in other words, people just like them.
By adding reviews from former customers or clients, the reader subconsciously sets aside initial doubts as they read what others have written about a positive experience they had with your company.
What if you don’t have any reviews?
We can always write up a few case studies that showcase your previous work or a good resolution that your products provided a customer.
Even if you have great reviews like we do, photo of your charming team can be very effective in persuading the site visitor, "Hey, these are people I'd like to work with." (Scroll up about five miles, and see if you agree!)
The Call To Action
We call it the CTA
By this point, we’ve successfully captured the attention of your visitor with a modern design and persuasive website content. We’ve gotten them to scroll down and skim the promise, offer, story, and proof elements of the website.
We’ve got just one last step to accomplish—the CTA.
This is the payoff of the whole webpage design. We need to get them to buy your products, fill out a contact form, or pick up the phone and call your office.
Many people think that adding their contact information to the top of a website will win them more leads. Not so. The truth of the matter is that regardless of how big and bold your phone number is—a first-time visitor who has seen nothing but your hook is simply not going to pick up the phone and call. You haven’t given them a reason to do so just yet.
While the top of a website is where people tend to first look for a phone number, it’s not the only place we add it.
If they’ve scrolled to the bottom of the page, by this point in the customer journey, if we've done our job, they're ready to take action.
We ensure that clicking the CTA is the easiest thing they can do—far easier than moving their mouse all the way back up to close the browser tab or hit the “Back” button. It's a split second decision, but studies show the bottom right portion of the page - if you get it right - is the sweet spot.
We use the same philosophy for clickable email addresses and easy-to-fill-out contact forms that don’t require visitors to sit there for 10 minutes while they fill out every single field.
We make it easy for people to reach out and start a conversation or make a purchase. Because your website, while it may be beautiful, was not created as an art project.
Effective web design pays for itself very quickly.
Tacoma Web Design Agency
You can have all the website traffic in the world—but if you don’t have the above essential elements, you’re losing out on potential clients and customers with each new visitor.
Call a Tacoma web design agency specializing in building high quality and visually stunning websites that convert first-time visitors into customers.
Give us a call today or schedule a visit, and we’ll show you why more Puget Sound businesses trust their websites and marketing campaigns to Bizango.