Learn How an Effective Website Can Boost Your Business

An effective website is a critical component of a company’s overall online success. Company’s website serves as the central hub and foundation for its online activity. With a plethora of available website designs, the digital marketing team must determine the appropriate and optimal design and message.

Besides having a basic understanding of the technology on the website, the digital marketing team must also consider the following facets of creating a website.

Consumer Perspective

• Relevancy—Age, cultural nuances, geography, and other demographic factors of the target audience will influence the type of content on the website.

• Usability Design—The digital marketing team must take into consideration how technically savvy its target customer is. If the target customer does not generally have the appropriate comfort level with technology, the team should design a simple, text-based layout with easy navigation and basic features. If the target customer is comfortable and familiar with the Internet and computer use, a more intricate, interactive, and information-rich website can be implemented. The design of the site should depend on the expectations of both the users and the company. In some cases, the development might focus on consumer engagement, while in other cases, the design might be oriented toward supporting task-oriented behavior such as the ability to make changes to one’s account, purchase a product or service, and so on.

Site Development Perspective

• Purpose—Companies maintain a web presence for a variety of reasons. While some companies use websites as their main method of selling their products, other companies have an online presence just to support their business, message, and brand position. There are companies that use websites as a public relations (PR) tool, to enhance brand value in the minds of their customers, or to evaluate product feedback from customers that may help in understanding customer needs, general communications, product updates, and sales. The digital marketing team is responsible for ensuring that the website is designed to meet the overall strategic objectives outlined in the Marketing Strategy.

• Planning—The digital marketing team must work with the website development team to plan the execution of the website, beginning with creating a storyboard for the website; listing functional requirements; building the database structure; developing wireframes; and determining hypermedia linkages, search engine key words, graphical design components, user interface designs, audio/video sources, animation, and text requirements and formats.

• Performance— The digital marketing team also must consider the logical design of a good website, compare the performance of competitor websites to identify best practices, check for effective performance across browsers and operating systems, and perform usability testing of the website to ensure that it is easy to use.

• Maintenance—Websites create an online presence for a brand, so the marketing team must ensure that the website is maintained and tested regularly. Downtime on a website may adversely impact the direct online sales of products and may also taint brand reputation in the minds of consumers.

The brand messaging on the website has to be in-line with the overall brand message and must stay relevant to the target audience.

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What are the technical skills required for developing a mobile app?

 

Generally, a company assigns a dedicated team to develop mobile applications for the organization. This team might be in-house, or the company may choose to assign the development work to an external firm. In either case, it is essential that the team has the necessary skills to develop mobile applications with the features that the company has determined are required.

A company may have fewer features in its first few apps, but it should ensure that the application development team has the requisite skills to create apps that have more advanced features as well, in case the company decides to add features at a later time. Given increasing mobile usage among customers across all industries, companies will, in all probability, need to constantly adapt to consumer needs and create more advanced mobile apps to keep up with mobile app trends and changing demands.

Also, several mobile application development platforms exist, and the team should ideally be able to develop applications across those platforms. However, if the team is able to identify and create apps for the most popular platform used by its target audience, then the company can test customer acceptance of its apps on the most frequently used platform before developing similar apps for other platforms.

The performance of mobile apps even on the same platform may differ based on the device type (tablet or phone) or the device model. Thus, the application development team must create apps that can perform equally well across device types and device models.

Some of the specific skill sets that a mobile app development team must have are as follows:

• User Interface (UI) design—This skill refers to the ability to design an app that has an attractive, easy-to-navigate, and responsive design. It requires both creative skill and knowledge of best practices in UI design for mobile apps.
• Database and hardware computing—This knowledge refers to the ability to create databases with an optimal data structure, specify interaction of the app with the device hardware, minimize power requirements, ensure security of the app against external threats like viruses and hacking, and allocate memory efficiently.
• Programming—Programming languages translate business logic into a machine-readable language. It is important to write programming code efficiently and in modules so changes to the code can be implemented easily. The team should have knowledge of using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for various mobile application platforms. These APIs allow programmers to create apps without requiring access to the proprietary underlying code developed by the mobile application platform companies. Preferably, the team should also know how to use interfaces that allow one to create mobile apps that can be deployed across different mobile application platforms.
• Business understanding—The app development team should have a basic understanding of the business’s overall Marketing Strategy and how the app fits into this strategy. This understanding will give the team a sense of the target customers, which may further enable them to create an optimal UI and ensure the final product supports the intended positioning of the app in the mobile app store.

 

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