Is your website making the right impression? Often the first point of contact between a business and its potential clients, that requires specific targeting and lead capturing strategy.
The Challenge:
Our latest project is for Indelible Consulting where their company website faced the challenge of modernizing its online presence. Their original website, built on WIX, lacked the contemporary design elements, functionality, and mobile responsiveness needed to effectively engage clients. With an expanding client portfolio of consulting services, it became crucial for Indelible Consulting to present a professional and user-friendly online experience.
Our Custom Solutions:
Understanding the specific needs of Indelible Consulting and the ICP of their clients, we embarked on a comprehensive redesign project. Our primary objective was to create a modern, visually appealing website on WordPress, incorporating the company’s brand color scheme and enhanced content. Additionally, we custom-built a Learning Management System (LMS) to facilitate the delivery of their educational courses.
Key Features:
Modern WordPress Design: We developed a sleek and modern WordPress website that aligns with Indelible Consulting’s brand identity. The new design includes updated content, intuitive navigation, and visually appealing elements to engage visitors.
Learning Management System (LMS): A custom-built LMS was integrated into the website, offering four courses that clients can purchase, consume, and complete through a full self-service process. This LMS ensures a seamless educational experience, enabling clients to access valuable content at their convenience.
Enhanced User Experience: The redesigned website is optimized for user experience, featuring clear calls to action, easy navigation, and a responsive design that works flawlessly on all devices. This ensures that potential clients have a positive and engaging experience when visiting the site.
Brand Color Scheme: The website design incorporates Indelible Consulting’s brand color scheme, ensuring consistency across all digital touchpoints and reinforcing brand recognition.
The Benefits of WordPress
WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, making it the most popular content management system (CMS) globally. Here are some compelling reasons why WordPress is an excellent choice for your business:
Flexibility and Customization: WordPress offers an extensive range of themes and plugins, allowing you to create a highly customized website that fits your unique business needs.
SEO-Friendly: WordPress is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, making it easier for your site to rank higher in search engine results.
Mobile Responsiveness: With the increasing use of mobile devices, having a mobile-responsive website is crucial. WordPress themes are designed to be mobile-friendly, ensuring a seamless user experience across all devices.
Security: Regular updates and a robust security framework make WordPress a secure platform for your website.
Scalability: Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, WordPress can scale with your business, accommodating your growing needs.
Why Redesign Your Website?
A website redesign can significantly impact your business. Here are some reasons why a small business might need to consider a website redesign:
Outdated Design: An old or outdated website can make your business appear unprofessional and out of touch.
Poor User Experience: A confusing or difficult-to-navigate website can frustrate visitors and drive potential clients away.
Lack of Mobile Responsiveness: With more people accessing the internet via mobile devices, a non-responsive website can result in lost opportunities.
Low Conversion Rates: If your website is not effectively converting visitors into clients, it may be time for a redesign.
SEO Performance: An outdated website may not be optimized for search engines, making it harder for potential clients to find you online.
Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign:
High Bounce Rates: Visitors leave your site quickly without engaging with your content.
Slow Loading Speeds: Your website takes too long to load, which can frustrate visitors and negatively impact your SEO.
Dated Visuals: Your website looks old-fashioned or does not align with your current brand identity.
Difficult Navigation: Users struggle to find the information they need.
Low Mobile Traffic: Your website is not optimized for mobile devices, resulting in a poor user experience on smartphones and tablets.
Enhancing with a Learning Management System (LMS)
For Indelible Consulting, adding an LMS was a strategic move to offer value-added services to their clients. Here’s why integrating an LMS can be beneficial:
Monetization: Offering premium courses can create a new revenue stream for your business.
Client Education: An LMS allows you to educate your clients on your products and services, enhancing their knowledge and engagement.
Brand Authority: Providing educational content positions your business as an authority in your industry.
Self-Service: Clients can access and complete courses at their own pace, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.
By implementing these custom solutions, our agency Design Theory significantly enhanced Indelible Consulting’s digital presence. The new website not only showcases their consulting expertise but also provides an intuitive platform for clients to engage with their services and educational content. This redesign positions Indelible Consulting as a modern, client-focused consulting firm, ready to meet the needs of their growing client base.
As the internet continues to evolve, website security has become a crucial aspect of ensuring a safe and trustworthy online experience. One of the most significant developments in this regard is the use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates. In this article, we’ll explore the reasons why it’s essential for websites to have an SSL certificate and why Google requires it.
What does it mean?
First, let’s define an SSL certificate. SSL is a standard security protocol that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data transferred between the server and the browser remains private and secure. SSL certificates are digital certificates that are issued by trusted third-party providers, known as Certificate Authorities (CAs). These certificates verify the authenticity of a website and encrypt all data transmitted between the website and the user’s browser.
Now, let’s get into why SSL certificates are crucial for websites
Data Protection One of the most significant benefits of SSL certificates is data protection. Without SSL, all data transferred between a user’s browser and a website is transmitted in plain text. This means that anyone who intercepts the data can read and use it for malicious purposes. SSL encrypts all data, making it unreadable to anyone who intercepts it.
Authentication SSL certificates also provide authentication. They verify the identity of the website, ensuring that users are communicating with the website they intended to. This helps prevent phishing scams, where attackers create fake websites to steal user information.
Improved SEO In 2014, Google announced that HTTPS (the secure version of HTTP, which uses SSL) would be a ranking signal in its search algorithm. Websites with SSL certificates are given a higher ranking than those without. This means that having an SSL certificate can improve a website’s visibility on search engines, which can lead to increased traffic.
Trust SSL certificates also create trust between websites and their users. Seeing the padlock icon in the browser bar and the “https” in the URL reassures users that their data is secure and that they can trust the website they’re visiting.
So let’s talk about why Google requires SSL certificates. In 2018, Google started marking all HTTP sites as “Not Secure” in the Chrome browser. This was part of Google’s plan to make the web a more secure place. Google wants to encourage all website owners to adopt HTTPS by making it a standard for all websites.
Google has also stated that websites without SSL certificates may be penalized in search rankings. As we mentioned earlier, SSL certificates are a ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. Websites without SSL certificates are seen as less trustworthy, and their rankings may be lowered as a result.
Our agency, Design Theory, has been informing our clients about a campaign we’re performing to have all of our client websites configured with an SSL Certificate. Great news if you’re already a client of ours, and if you’re not but want to get your SSL Certificate installed on your website, give us a call or email and we’d be happy to help you!
To wrap things up, SSL certificates are crucial for website security, data protection, authentication, SEO, and trust. Google requires SSL certificates to make the web a safer place and to encourage website owners to adopt HTTPS. If you’re a website owner, it’s essential to obtain an SSL certificate to ensure your website’s security and to maintain your search rankings.
You’ve got a WordPress website, that’s great! Now you’re probably wondering how to get more people to see and visit it with all the hard work you put into it. Thankfully there’s plugins and strategy you can use to boost your search engine ranking, and you’ll be learning more about those during this presentation. 95% of everything shown and explained in this presentation are shovel ready items that you can take and put to work immediately on your own websites. If you’re looking for a custom solution or strategy for your email marketing efforts, please be sure to contact us so that we can help.
In this short video, I show how to create a reading progress bar using a free WordPress Plugin called Reading Progress bar from Jean-Baptiste Audras. This is ideal for websites with blogs or long form content where your readers will see their progress as they scroll down reading. It keeps a custom colored progress bar at the top of the screen just below the URL address bar of the browser and scrolls from left to right as the reader continues to scroll down the page.
We’ve all been there. Some of us more than others – yet still the idea of a redesign initially starts out with great aspirations, then leads to feverish or lackluster enthusiasm weeks later. Let me back up and explain my story.
It’s been probably three or four years since our last redesign of the Design Theory Website. Years ago I can remember when I first tried WordPress and had a blog in a sub-domain while having our main website in HTML on the root. It worked out better than I could have expected and within about nine months I was ready to convert everything into one site on WordPress.
Fast forward to present day, and I can honestly say that I’ve been working on this redesign for about two months. Not consistently, more on-and-off. Reason being is that, well, we’ve been busy. Being busy is a good thing when you’re a creative but only to a certain point. Some of our best ideas get filtered into our client websites and strategy efforts, meanwhile our own website gets the cold shoulder.
Why Are We Taking So Long
To be honest and short, we want a really good and clean experience for you. We want all of our services laid out in a way that is easier to navigate, lead/sales funnels created with purpose, and products easier to identify and purchase. What we’ve learned over the years is that the customer experience is what matters the most in any website. It kind of needs to be catered to them more so than what I think the website should be designed like.
Another reason for the redesign is to make the new website load much faster than the current one does. Realizing that more web traffic is done via mobile browsers than desktops, we have to make sure that our website loads smooth and fast on hand-held devices. Make sure that it’s also Google Mobile Friendly is key too. It’s important to make sure that the almighty Google deems our website acceptable.
Lastly, we believe it’s time for a refresh. There are a lot of ideas that we want to do that include a rebrand, but we’re going to have to hold off on some of those bigger and more time intensive initiatives to be able to focus on tangible goals and a timeline. Good ideas are great but they’re truly a dime a dozen. It’s really about executing and to be able to launch some of our more necessary ideas we have to stay focused. When it comes to our customer redesigns we treat them the same. We come up with a lot of great ideas from improved functionality, new software, and new graphics, but we also stage things out in milestones so that there is always something to look forward to over the next several weeks and months.
As you can see we’ve got a lot to consider with our redesign. It’s more important to us that it’s done right than just putting together a new design and layout without constructive though behind it for usability. Have you been thinking about a redesign of your website? What is holding you back from getting started? Let us know in the comments below or contact us directly if we can help.
