Why website design is necessary for any business

We choose a design in anything we purchase from a car, furniture, clothes, watches etc then why not for websites. For a business, were solely based on e-commerce or an established business looking for digital space exposure, a website is forefront you present. If your business is an e-commerce or you are providing digital services like blog hosting, online course or domain hosting then this is something you have to get it right as your entire business depends on it. It takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website. 94 per cent of negative website feedback was design related. If you have any other business but want a website so that you can cater to a wider audience then your business website is the first impression of your business profile and a powerful means for business lead generation. There are nearly 2 billion websites on the internet and to stand you and compete you have to pull your designer socks.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. You cannot decide which design people find beautiful and which one not but what you can do is make use of different website designing tools, understanding colour palette, typography and many more tools and techniques to make an aesthetically pleasing website. You can get inspiration from the voted best-designed website such as seriously unsweetened, Crypton trading, Apple, lemonade etc. What makes these sites beautiful is that they are simple, minimalistic and in touch with what their brand represents.

What is web designing?

Web designing or website designing is a process of designing, planning, conceptualizing the web content that is to be hosted on the internet. Web designing is not limited to how good the website should look but also entails how it should work. Website functionality, navigation, action on any icon clicks or button press, an arrangement of content, display details for images, videos, layout, the shape of icons and buttons speed, animations, ads, cross-browser compatibility and cross-device compatibility all come under the purview of web designing.

There are two ways to create a website design

1 Adaptive website – There is two or more version of the website created to various devices and a user agent can inform the server to load which version.

2 Responsive website – These uses flexible grids that adapt to the screen size of various devices.

Although various tools such as WordPress, Squarespace etc are available online through which you can create your website without writing a single code. Some of these tools are based on WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) approach. They make web designing a child’s play.

These tools can be used when you have to create a website based on individual content or small business. When a business scale is medium or large or business is solely based online then taking professional web designer help is advisable. Web designing is nowadays not just simple formatting through HTML but is more complicated than that.

Also Read: What makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO?

Why website designing is important?

A good website is something you cannot do without if you want to stay relevant on the internet. A business website is not just a website but your digital showroom for your products and services and it has to be appealing.75 per cent of consumers judge a business’s credibility by the design of its website.

First Impression

You cannot make the first impression twice. When you market your brand through any means like social media, word of mouth etc, you want people to reach out to you or visit your site and make some purchase. When people visit your website the first time, it makes a lasting impression on them. It is the first step a major step through which they form an image for your brand. If the design of your business is outdated or unappealing then visitor won’t return to your website. A bad design can also hamper the process of trust-building with clients and also make them think about a future issue like query or customer service issues could be solved through your website or not. There is a saying that never judges a book by its cover but in case of the website, it is the digital cover of the business book that people are judging and this judgment is long-lasting.

Defines your brand

A good website can make your brand image and a bad website could break it. Good website design is the one that is in line with your brand image and vision. Like you have a meditation, health and wellness centre then your website should be such that it conveys the peace that you are offering at your centre through the website. Light pastel shades, soft edge buttons and image display, the de-cluttered webpage with bare essential information will represent what your brand project that is peace and tranquillity. Every brand has a logo. The website of your brand should be in sync with the logo of your brand. The website colour scheme and typography should match the design and colour of your logo. Your brand vision should be reflected in your website design. 88 per cent of online consumers are less likely to return to a site if they’ve had a bad experience.

Engages the customer

When a customer visits a shop or a showroom the shop keeper will engage the customer to find out what he wants and what else he can be sold. In the digital marketplace, that salesman is replaced by a website. When a customer visits your website he or she should feel welcomed and find your website engaging. The interactive animation and link should take to the product that he was looking for and during this navigation, he should be made aware of the amazing deals that you are offering right now. Your website homepage should be simple enough so that customer doesn’t feel overwhelmed and attractive and aesthetically pleasing enough that it holds his attention.

Navigation is vital for pleasant user experience. As a customer accesses your various web pages, he should feel ease in navigation. Good design makes it possible. A good design will be such that it uses the basic online customer behavioural aspects into consideration. Like most visitor focuses on the top right part of the website when accessing through desktop or laptop so try to put the content you want the customer to focus on in that area. Your homepage can be used to make people aware of new product arrival, flash sales and discount you are offering.

Visual content like images, videos and animation can make your site eye-pleasing. As customer attention has shifted towards infographics, images and visual content, nobody has got time to read large paragraphs. If you try to cram content on your website it will look overwhelming and nobody got too much time in their hands these days to read each line. That is why quotes are more famous these days than poems and prose. Your design can make use of infographics and images to get your point across with minimum words.

Nowadays there is a paradigm shift in how the customer accesses your website. Most people are comfortable in navigating the web through mobile phones, mini-laptops and tablets thus your website design should be adjustable to accommodate various platforms. 85 per cent of adults think that a company’s mobile version of their website should be better than their desktop version.

Also Read: B2B Customer Engagement Strategy and How You Can Make It Work for You

Point of sale

Your website is the point of sale for your business. The customer visiting the site will contact you, view your products and services and will place an order. Bad design can make these simple tasks too complicated for the customer. Like if you are doing some online purchase and added few things in your cart now want to remove them or reduce and increase the quantity then the design should be such that allows that with ease or for example your have filled your entire details for subscription and loss the internet connection if website design makes use of cookies then you don’t have to type the details again. They will get an auto-fill. These are basic things that your website design will have to get right because sometimes small things grate on the nerves of your customer and make them abandon their session.

SEO optimization

Your website design is the placeholder for all the keywords that get your website on the top pages on search engine listing. Your website design will aid your SEO strategy to win the uphill battle for visibility on the internet. Your website design must be SEO friendly. There is no use of an amazing website if nobody can see it.

Also Read: 10 Things Google Loves to See on Every Website! Does your Website have them?

On-time

If your design is bad without javascript optimization, CSS optimization or poorly designed script it will increase your website loading time. 47 per cent of website users expect a maximum loading time of 2 seconds. If your website takes longer to load customer is most likely to abandon session in middle.

In conclusion

When so much money is spent on digital marketing through social networking sites, SEO optimization, web scraping services, data verification, data appending services, data mining services, data scraping, data scrubbing, skip tracing services, address search and email appending services then why make your site look like this

When it could look like this

Web Scraping: Leave it All to AI or Add a Human Touch

What was once used by the US military as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency network) is today known as the Internet. With data grew from few gigabytes to 1.2 million terabytes today. In 1995 the internet was used by 16 million users. Today there are more than 4600 million users on internet and numbers are growing with each passing second. The last two years alone has made up for 90 per cent of the internet data today.  

This growth of internet users and their information has increased the data storage exponentially. Whatever you do on the internet, you will leave a digital trail. Even a random search by a random user will count in internet trend and affects the indexing of search engines. The data servers are now occupying space of football fields. Major companies like Google, Amazon etc are providing with cloud computing and cloud storage services to tap internet users’ data storage demand. With the need to store replicate data in case of natural catastrophe; more space is consumed by dedicated servers.

The surfing of the internet as much as it can be fun for regular users like us, for data scientists and businesses that desire some relevant information can become an uphill task. To find a needle in a haystack is easier than finding desired data on internet manually. The amount of data created and stored by a single large company is so vast that private data centres are employed. By this, we can envision how much data is available on the internet.

The role of data science, data mining and data scraping has increased tremendously. Web scraping services are used majorly for data extraction and data analysis. Web scraping is used for diverse purposes like business competition, research and analysis, consumer insights, security purposes, government purposes etc. 

What is Web Scraping?

The extraction of data from websites is called web scraping or web harvesting. The specific data is copied from websites to local database or spreadsheet. Web scraping services or data scraping services use hypertext protocol or Extensible hypertext protocol for data extraction. The scraping can be done manually by visiting the particular page and copying data manually into a spreadsheet.

The manually scraping is possible when we are working for personal usage and data we are working with is limited. When we are dealing with a large amount of data an automated process is essential. It is implemented using a bot.

Web scraping and web crawling often mistaken for same but are different. Web crawling is done by search engines for indexing of hyperlinks, whereas web scraping does the data extraction. Web crawling is used in web scraping for fetching pages.

The websites now a day are highly advanced with using gifs, scripts, flash animations etc in an integrated ecosystem. Websites are developed, keeping human in mind, not bots therefore data extraction become a challenging task. The data extraction is based on the data stored by websites in text form. The mark-up languages such as HTML and XHTML are used for the development of a basic framework for any website. The specialised software use this rich text data for extraction. 

There are simple plug-ins such as Scraper, Data Scraper for Google chrome used for web scraping. There specialised software such as ParseHub, OutwitHub, etc employed for slightly advance level of web scraping. The major e-commerce companies such as Amazon and social networking companies such as Facebook provide their APIs (Application programming interface) for public data extraction. 

AI is a necessary evil in data scraping. The quantity of data has forced the implementation of AI. The AI as helpful it can be, unnerve people with wild sci-fi fantasy that pales the Matrix trilogy in comparison.

Also Read: 12 Best WordPress plugins every Sales and Marketing website must have

The legality of web scraping

“Just like the wild west, the Internet has no rules”. The times have changed in the wild west and on the Internet. The computer fraud and abuse laws criminalise any act of breaking into any private computer systems and accessing non-publically available data. In 2016 hiQ  Labs, a data science company web scrapped the publically available LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn terms this as a violation of the company’s policy on data usage without permission and authorization. The hiQ took LinkedIn to court. In a landmark judgement for web scraping legality, the court ruled in favour of hiQ stating, “web scraping of public data is not a violation of computer fraud and abuse act.” 

Also Read: Data scraping for BI: Picking the right service is vital

The morality of web scraping

The web scraping is used in business for online price monitoring, price comparison, product review data. The real estate companies use it to gather competitor real state listing. The websites use other website public data for their convenience without having to work for it. The web scraping lies in the grey area of morality where few times its use cab be justified with internet policy and sometimes complete violation of basic internet ethics.  

If you are searching for cheaply available phones with a certain price range and use web scraping tool on a major e-commerce website for data extraction then it quite ethical and can be justified. When you extract data for a content-based site with its USP being uniquely available content such as blogging websites and created a mirror site then it cannot be justified.

A basic moral conscience is necessary for making a righteous judgment in the age of the internet where the lines are quite blurred.

Concept of the good bot and bad bot

The supporting of web scraping often linked with freedom of the internet and fair use of public data but the picture is not as rosy as it seems. There are many bad bots ie malicious automated software available which can steal data by breaking into user accounts, overload servers with providing junk data and harm websites.

The AI bot gets a bad reputation due to malicious bot crawling the internet space. Many websites prohibit web scraping. The websites use advance tools for bot detection and prevent them from viewing their pages. This solution to this is the use of DOM parsing, simulation of human behaviour etc to extract data from sites.

Does it require adding a magic touch?

We are leaving in the age of artificial intelligence. It is the intelligence demonstrated by machines. The machines are incapable of thinking by themselves. The highly complex software is used to develop machine intelligence that learns, adapt and collects data. The AI is now used in several areas from traffic regulation, pilot training in the aviation industry, critical fields such as nuclear reactors etc. The AI has made possible rooming of the rover on Mars. 

People are apprehensive of AI and believing a new world order where machine rules human. These make up for a good sci-fi script or story but the reality is too mechanical. AI has made it possible to work in an environment where humans could not survive. The sensitive area such as military, national security etc relies on AI for information processing. Human lives depend on AI proper working.

The internet is brimming with boundless data. The manual data extraction can be tedious in past but with data storage reaching in terabytes, it is nearly impossible. We have to implement AI for web harvesting and data mining services. The AI can extract store and process data from thousands of pages in a few seconds. The manual scraping does only a few hundred pages in days.  The AI has made it possible to scrape websites with a gigantic database and analyses it for forming business strategies and predictions. 

Does that mean the AI has replaced human in web scraping area at least? Well, the answer is not binary. The AI does a spectacular job in web harvesting but the human touch is indispensable. When data is extracted just like an ore is extracted. It has to go through various processes of floatation, smelting etc to be useful. The data gathered from the site could be repetitive, redundant and in the wrong format. When we are extracting this kind of data we are overloading storage with unnecessary data. Data verification and data scrubbing will cleanse the inaccurate and corrupt records from the extracted data. These are quite state of art tools but the ultimate power lies in the hands of a human.

The intelligence of the machine is called artificial for a reason. The AI extracting data cannot determine its necessity for a purpose like a human does. Let us suppose a company want to launch a new clothing line for teenage girls. They are extracting data for what teenage girls find fashionable. Many times websites want to remain on the forward listing of search engines pages and use the metadata incorrectly. The AI being AI will extract the data for teenage fashion and data will imply something else. 

Also Read: How Digitalization is transforming the Business of B2B Industry Data

Many websites prevent web crawling by using CAPTCHAS, embedding information in media objects, login access requirement, changing website HTML regularly etc. The AI right now cannot trespass these mechanisms of prevention of web scraping. 

In a situation like these, human touch became essential. As they say, “The artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as an artificial rose is to real rose.”

Scaling your eCommerce start-up in the age of Amazon

The popularity of Amazon is indisputable. From a humble bookselling start-up in 1994 to eCommerce business giant, Amazon has come a long way. Amazon is holding its share of business in the cut-throat eCommerce business. No other competitor in many countries is anywhere near it. Amazon itself has an inventory of about 12 million items across all its categories and services but on a broader level all the items that Marketplace sellers list, that number expands to about 350 million. Amazon was responsible for 45% of US eCommerce spending in 2019 and is expected to rise to 47% in 2020.

With the driving force of Amazon web services, it seems impossible to stop this juggernaut. Amazon is a market place where cheap manufacture meets sellers for branding. Amazon’s strategy of flooding of cheap products and free shipping has toughened the survival of small and medium scale competitors. The small e-commerce businesses neither have the capital nor reach of Amazon. Some e-commerce businesses opt for the strategy of competitive pricing. A competitor based pricing strategy can be sustained during the initial stages of market entry but as you progress you cannot use it effectively. The eCommerce business with low pricing, high operating cost, and expanding its supply chain and distribution network will suffer from the loss.

The above statistics paint a dire picture indeed but all hope is not lost. Amazon competitor in many countries has proven that even the dragon giant as Amazon can be slain using the sword of ecommerce solutions and data mining services.

The ecommerce solutions to this modern-day problem can be found in the traditional business model which is still surviving and thriving in this online global marketplace.

Knowing your self

Amazon is become so large and selling everything under the sun that its brand image is turned generic. No consumer in this wanted to link to a bland and vapid brand image. It is a chunk in the armor that can be explored. Why ecommerce businesses like Esty, Myntra, Casper, etc are successful because they know what they are offering. In the bookselling market, Barnes and Noble are giving Amazon run for its money. Knowing your brand and building its image can help small ecommerce businesses in holding their own in this competition. Be courageous enough to be authentic. Just as a shopkeeper will know what it is offering that shop around the corner is not.

Knowing your market

It is like opening a shop of frozen yogurt where everyone is offering ice-cream. The massiveness of Amazon can be used for business advantage as it cannot focus on every market opportunity. When you sell from toothpick to table lamp focused on the quality of every listing becomes sloppy. Another ecommerce giant like Flipkart in India has covered the market of mobile and electronics extensively which Amazon has not focused on. Myntra has covered the market for fashion that Amazon till now is not offering much. Cosmetic market, which is now a fast-growing market, ecommerce brand like Nyaka has covered it. There are many unexplored avenues in e commerce business that can be explored.

Seeing through the eyes of the customer

A traditional shop owner will keep the focus on the ambiance and neatness of the shop. That traditional customer experience is replaced with user experience UX in ecommerce. E-commerce business websites should be eye-pleasing and user friendly. An out of place color icon can even turn off some customer and can vow to never return. A single bad experience on a website makes users 88 % less likely to visit the website again. The data mining techniques can be utilized that capture various parameters of user behavior on the website. With the analysis of this data, various inferences to visitor behavior can be made.

Ecommerce sites can look for customer’s stay time on-site to track whether it’s up to visitor liking or not. If visitor time of too short or too long both are problems. If it’s too short or abandonment in middle signify that it has not to find a site to his liking. In the case of abandonment, something before abandonment was not working for him. If staying too long means that either website was confusing or it has not found something he was looking for.

Not getting lost in the crowd

Amazon is offering consumers with quantity with flooding of products but users prefer quality too sometimes. This trade-off can be managed if the quality product offers at somewhat competitive pricing. But presented with quality products people will choose even if pricy. The demand for Apple products is a living example of this. If you are offering a genuinely good product, without advertising, you will be lost in the sea of cheap products. In traditional business, advertising is done by pamphlets and hoarding. In ecommerce SEO will help you reach in forward pages of search engine listing. The majority of web users are likely to view up to three pages of search engine listing. Your presence of different social media outlets can be like Instagram, Facebook, etc will build brand image, new product advertisement, customer reach, and in turn will increase site visits. As the customer base, today is millennial with ages from 18 to 34 social media presence is essential. Brand storytelling through videos and customer experience promotion have a high social impact on the customer. You can also reach in the prime listing of the search engine when users search for no particular product in mind just through social media presence. When users hit your site even when no sale is made, it can improve your search engine presence.

Also Read: The Ultimate B2B SEO Guide

Knowing your customer

When we visit a shop and shopkeeper remember our name, preference, or item we have recently purchased as a customer we feel validated. The same could be offered through sites too. The Amazon also utilizes these tools but customer engagement is deep when business is small and customer connects to brand image. With the utilization of customer behavior data analysis tools customer behavior can be tracked. Customizable site theme, a suggestion based on previous searches, pitching for more items based on online searches, a suggestion for you may also like gives the customer an individualized experience and could hike sales of connected items. Beautiful packaging adds to customer satisfaction. By making packaging interesting so that opening the product itself is an experience for the customer and inspire him to post on social media so that your product gets to advertise for free. Amazon free shipping is difficult to compete but with the help of an efficient and reliable logistic service, this hindrance can be overcome. The clear shipping policy, package tracking, and clear return policy can keep customers happy without free shipping.

Customer a true promoter and reviewer

Some shops offer customers with suggestion boxes and reviews shop experience that collecting feedback will help in the improvement of services and removing loopholes that can be used by competitors. On b2b website reviews, storytelling, and suggestion by the customer can be included so that engagement is felt. Sometimes customers like your product but forget to review it. Email appending services, email verification services, or email data validation can be used and Emails can be sent to the customer as a reminder for review. Online visitors are more prone to customer reviews in deciding for purchase of product then product description by seller. Customer loyalty programs like providing with pre-sale benefit, exclusive discount offer, limited deals will incentivize customer loyalty and they will felt connected and appreciated. The sellers can be provided with basic and premium membership services through which they can create their homepage, replying to buying leads, and contact buyers. Amazon uses this strategy through Amazon prime services. There are over 150 million Amazon Prime members around the world and they typically spend over $1,000 a year. The estimated percentage of Amazon prime customers is 63%.

Customer forum helps customers connecting and making even pitch for product sales. FAQ section can help in resolving doubt. Live chat tools can provide that and may redress many customer issues. A site should provide a room to vent customer frustration or another will. Proper customer complaint mechanism is important and so is its prompt resolution.

Also Read: B2B Customer Retention Strategies – How To Retain Your Best B2B Clients

The foundation of Ecommerce Empire

All the strategies are just a building block for e-commerce business but the driving for is SEO, data analytics tool, and skip tracing services. Data verification, address search, web scraping services, data scrubbing, and data appending services play a major role.

These tools will help in b2b lead generation. Many web services provide ecommerce solutions, cloud computing services, and data servers for storage. With limited investment in dedicated servers, these online services could be used. Analytics tools are crucial to today’s marketing success. Google Analytics, Bitly, Piwik, Open Web Analytics, etc tools are available for free.

Amazon is truly far-reaching as Amazon River with a dominating presence in 16 countries. B2B giants such as Alibaba, Indiamart, e world trade, etc prove that as uphill the task may be, it could be done.