WebSmiths Presentation Part 2: What exactly do you want the website to achieve for you?
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So, as you've seen in Part 1, the intended target audience is a major factor in web design and we'll look at this aspect again indirectly in Part 3. But in this part we want to address the next essential question of web design:
“What exactly do you want the website to achieve for you?”
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That might sound like a strange question, but it really isn’t. ​Many businesses get most, or even all, of their custom online. Think of Amazon, for example — a name almost everyone knows. They're the second-largest retailer in the world by revenue (just behind Walmart). Yet for the first twenty years of their existence, they didn’t operate a single physical store. Even now, their brick-and-mortar shops are incidental to their online operations.
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On the other hand, some businesses — think village butchers, pubs, tea rooms — get the vast majority of their trade from local walk-ins. They might have (or want) a website to increase awareness, but their core strength is physical location and community presence.
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Now consider solicitors, accountants, roofers, plumbers… Where does their business usually come from? Often it's word-of-mouth, referrals, or local advertising. So why do they need a website? The answer is: credibility.
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If someone is considering legal advice, they’ll almost always check the solicitor’s website first — to see what areas of law they specialise in, or simply to feel reassured. In the case of tradespeople like builders, customers will likely want to see reviews, photos, and contact details before reaching out.
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So, as we can see, websites serve different purposes for different businesses. And with our help, you need to determine:
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"Is your website meant to attract most of your clients?"
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"Is it to give your business credibility?"
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"Is it to sell online?"
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"Is it purely informational, like a church or community group?"
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"Or is it a combination of things?"
The answers will shape the design, structure, and content of your website. A purely informational website will look completely different to one that is designed to generate leads for a double-glazing firm or an insulation firm, for example.
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So let's take a look at a few examples - one from each category and see what they might look like.
1. E-commerce / Online Selling
Let's start out with e-commerce which simply means selling things online. This concept is very easy for anyone to understand as most people in the UK have bought something online and many (very many) have an account with Amazon which is the golden child of e-commerce as well as the world's second largest retailer. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the landing layout and it's neatly organised with an easy to use top menu system on two levels.
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Below that there are products and product categories which change based on whether you are logged in or not, what cookies are detected and by seasons and special occasions. Whatever you think of Amazon (like or dislike) we all have to concede that in terms of selling large inventory stuff online they are the ones to follow.
But not everyone is selling "large inventory", in fact most online retailers are selling products from a significantly smaller range and some have extremely limited offerings and are actually very niche - and that demands a completely different style of layout. Below is a template for a Handmade Jewelry store which looks clean, modern and stylish. The use of the wooden background is also a nice touch.
Obviously for this type of website, the design is only half the story, as we would need to set up a product inventory database and a checkout that could accept payments (Visa, Mastercard, Etc.) and then notify you (e.g. mobile App, email, SMS etc.) that you made a sale and you need to ship something.
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Depending on how your business is structured from an IT point of view and what you already have in place (and also how many products you have) then one of the main retail platforms like Shopify, Woo Commerce or Wix, just as examples, would probably be your quickest and most cost effective method of getting set up and running and although we can always build from scratch if that's what you want, there are already so many perfectly good templates for this type of website it would be pretty pointless from your point of view to pay for a site built from scratch when one of these templates (totally customised to your branding and colour scheme) would be absolutely fine for you. At WebSmiths we will always advise you on what's best for you and we don't try to sell folks custom builds for many thousands of pounds when there is a much cheaper option that will be just good - or even better in some cases, if you wanted, for example, to plug into the already prebuilt Shopify shipping process.
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We can usually do an online store selling up to a hundred or so products in less than week if you work with us and upload your stock images, descriptions and prices etc., and because you're doing the product uploading while we're working on the design, it not only speeds up the process but it will keep your costs down in terms of paying us. Naturally, if you want us to do absolutely everything for the setup, including uploading your stock, then we will of course do that, but the cost will be correspondingly higher as this can take quite a while to do.
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Quick Links to each Section
As we said above, the presentation is best watched in order - it will make more sense that way. However, if you've already been through it once and want to re-watch a particular section then the links below will avoid you having to go through the whole thing again to get to the part you want to re-watch.
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Part 1: What type or style of website do you actually need?
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Part 2: What exactly do you want the website to achieve for you?
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Part 3: How should homepage/landing page images best be combined with text for maximum impact?
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Part 4: Why you must own (in your own name or in your company's name) your domain & email service, and have full admin access to your hosting.