Squarespace design: good web design is good for business
Your website is an extension of your brand. From soloprenuers, startups and small businesses to growing firms and large corporations, this holds true. So often people treat a website as another item they need to tick off their laundry list of things to do. Truth is, at best, your website can be a powerhouse for your business. At worst, a poorly designed website is leaving money on the table and potentially harming your brand 💸
Squarespace web design - focusing on empathy
A well designed Squarespace website goes beyond having something current. At this stage in the game there are countless templates to choose from, and a huge supply of creative assets for purchase from brilliant designers. While I am a huge advocate for having a modern website, it is important to note that a trendy website isn’t always a well designed one. As with any form of design, you want to strike the balance between substance and style. After all, a great looking bicycle with flat tires, an ill fitting seat, and misshaped handlebars might look sharp from a distance but it won’t get you very far.
Google is increasingly putting more and more emphasis on user experience. To put it succinctly, you are more likely to show up in search engines if your website provides a good user experience. People generally come to your website to get something done. Google knows this and Google wants to provide the best possible result to people using their search engine. Consequently, you need to design your website to meet user needs.
Providing a great user experience requires you to:
1: Understand your audience including their motivations and pain points.
The most important thing to remember here, is that your website, isn’t about you. It is about your audience. It is about serving up the content they are seeking to solve a problem, gather information or make a purchase. Additionally, it is about delivering that content at the right time, in a manner your audience prefers to consume.
In 2022, so much of marketing and web design is spammy and frankly intolerable. Good web design and smart marketing is about making the extra effort, care and consideration to understand your audience, and thoughtfully offer a solution to their problem or query. Yes, there are a lot of tactics and best practices for growing your business, but at the heart of it, people want a considerate, trustworthy and authentic experience. Consumers are becoming increasingly weary of big data, and sneaky marketing tactics. People want to work with companies who put in the effort to provide a thoughtful and excellent experience.
Understanding your audience with buyer personas:
If you can't quite define your audience, you'll want to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and involve demographic and psychometric data. When building campaigns, posting across social or building and optimizing your website, you'll want to refer back to your buyer personas.
It is important to remember that buyer personas can be limiting - people are complicated and can’t be summed up in a single worksheet. That said, they are a decent place to start. For an excellent article on building buyer personas that start with empathy, visit this article from Webflow.
Good Squarespace design is inclusive
When thinking about designing with empathy, it is crucial to have diversity and inclusion as a central focus. In 2022 there are really no excuses for failing when it comes to inclusive web design. From images and illustrations to web copy, there are a number of great resources to deliver a website that mirrors a diverse audience.
As an example, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, 1 in 5 Gen Z U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+. What does this mean for web design? People want to see themselves seen and represented in marketing and design. If for example you’re a realtor, or any service provider for that matter, consider your visuals - are you assuming all of your clients are heterosexual? Moreover, consider you copy, use gender inclusive language and consider when certain information is really necessary.
Gender-inclusive language
Adding pronouns to the team section or about me section of your website is a great place to start. Check out Argo Collective to see this in action.
Additionally, if you have a form requiring gender (is this really required?), make sure people can input what is correct for them - do not limit them to male/female. Also, a person’s legal name may not be their preferred name - this is something you’ll want to be mindful of. You don’t want to deadname someone when you reach out in a follow-up email.
For a great example of gender inclusive copy, Mejuri illustrated pronouns done right in their International Women’s day Campaign. I was thrilled to see this from Mejuri, and it is my hope this will become best practice across the industry. For a beginner’s guide on Inclusive Design, visit this article from Career Foundry.
How can you create a diverse and inclusive website experience?
Make sure you use diverse photography. There are a lot of great options for diverse stock photos - two great sources are unsplash and pexles.
Use diverse illustrations. Blush by Pablo Stanley is a great source for diverse illustrations from incredibly talented artists.
Be mindful of gender inclusive language - consider assumptions of heterosexuality, pronouns, and what (e.g. webforms - do you really need someone’s gender?)
Hire diverse designers and marketers. The reality is that tech is largely made up of straight, cisgender, white men. If you want to champion diversity in design, hire diverse designers.
Good web design is goal oriented
So often a website is an after thought. Or, web design and marketing are operating in complete silos. Not treating web design as part of your overall business strategy is leaving money on the table.
Effective website design requires looking at your website as your most powerful marketing tool. Every element of your website, including paragraphs, headings, and buttons (calls to action), should be thought about carefully. Before setting out to build a website, you’ll want to consider your business goals. From there, you’ll want to consider how a website can help you reach those goals.
When creating a website, you'll first want to consider:
1) What are my website goals?
2) How will people find my website?
3) What action do I want people to take on the website?
As we move towards a cookieless web, it is increasingly important to think about how you will drive quality traffic to your website. You are not just adding a product or writing a paragraph about your services. You are very carefully considering your keywords, the length of your page (will this experience work well on mobile?), the channels through which your audience will find you, and so forth.
Good web design finds the intersection between business goals and user needs
More than ever before, web design and digital marketing are intertwined. Effective digital marketing and web design remove friction. Whether you are ready to revise your current website or are considering building a new one, a key focus should be creating a website that meets both visitor needs and business goals.
The biggest mistake I see in web design is a structure that fails to take into account what pages that are fundamental to a businesses success, and how they will drive traffic to those pages. For example, people often want to grow in a particular vertical but they do not have a foundation in place to foster that growth. When a website isn’t built with marketing in mind, it is very difficult to have short term wins using paid ad promotion, or set yourself up for long terms success by increasing your visibility in search engines.
I first learned about the core model in conference workshop by Ida Aalen, a very talented UX researcher and content strategist. The core model helps you identify the most important pages on your website and consider the role each page plays in your business success, along with the usefulness of your content. Most importantly, the core model helps you stay focused on website visitors.
In my opinion, structuring pages based on the core model creates website a foundation that allows you to take advantage of short term success through tactics like paid ads, and focus on long term success by building a foundation for long term success through increased discoverability in search engines.
While the core model is meant to be used to help several stakeholders reach consensus, I believe it is an excellent exercise to use when building a website. Often, websites are built without considering what information or pages are truly necessary. The core model reminds us to consider if these pages help us reach our business objectives and provide information potential customers are looking for.
This task generally asks us to sit down with our UX designer, content strategist, graphic designers and so forth. Just because you aren’t a major corporation with a large team or several stakeholders, doesn’t mean the core model isn’t useful. While this exercise is usually done with a group of key stakeholders and facilitated by a third party, I think the questions the core model asks us to consider are just as relevant for a large corporation as they for a small business or solopreneur. No matter the size of your business, user experience is important.
For an excellent breakdown on the core model, visit this article:
I think the core model is an extremely valuable tool, particularly when it comes to building service pages. Let’s consider a fictitious small business, such as a painting company. This company offers both interior and exterior painting for commercial and residential locations. While I used a fictitious painting company you can see how this would also work for professional service firms such as accountants offering tax services, bookkeeping, CFO services, an so on. I more recently used this model when working for a non profit with a huge amount of outdated pages and legacy content and found it incredibly useful.
Core page:
Interior residential painting
Business goals:
Sell someone our interior painting services
Illustrate to a potential customer why we provide the best interior painting services
User Tasks:
Learn more about interior painting choices
Book someone to paint the interior of my house
Inward Paths (how are people finding this page):
Googling “interior paint companies near me”
Googling “what is the best type of paint for my living room”
Homepage of our website
Paid social media Ad
Core content:
Information about interior paint
Examples of why we are the best company to help
Before and after photos
Social proof via testimonials or accreditation
Forward paths (where do we want to send our user next):
Fill out a form to contact us
Learn more about trending colour palettes and design inspiration
Call us for more information
When we focus on business needs, user tasks, core content and forward paths, we are able to set ourselves up to create high converting web pages. The reason I love the core model is because it is a great tool for staying focused, and really comes down to creating a great user experience, and that is what good web design is all about.
Building a good Squarespace website is about so much more than what is trending. It requires you to think carefully about your business goals and your audience. It isn’t about stuffing your website with keywords, but instead thinking carefully about the kind of content your audience needs to make a decision, and providing that information thoughtfully and effectively.
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