You make sure your boots are clean when you turn up at a job.

Your vans are emblazoned with professionally-designed logos.

Every flier and brochures is entrusted to specialist graphic designers.

While appearance isn’t everything, it can’t be denied that it has a big role to play in what people think of your tradie business. This goes for all aspects of your operations – including your digital marketing efforts!

If you ask us, getting found online is just step one. Equally important is ensuring that people are convinced to choose you over your competitors.

There are many tools to achieve this – including effective web design for tradies.

Web design for tradies and the user experience

How web design for tradies builds your credibility

You can’t just pick a random theme and call it a day – that’s how you end up with websites that look like these.

Going through that list, and you’ll see a couple of repeat offenses come up:

  • Colours that don’t go well together
  • Websites that look like they’re from the ‘90s
  • Poorly laid out (or non-existent) navigation bars
  • Over-the-top, distracting animation
  • Lots of tiny, dense written content

We don’t know about you, but this doesn’t exactly inspire trust in us!

For many customers, it’s the same story. Web design can be a big deal – according to research, 97% of buyers were influenced by websites.

Naturally, you’ll want your site to look fantastic!

Good web design knows who it’s targeted towards

There’s no secret recipe to a high-performing website. In many cases, it’ll come down to your audience and what they want to see.

That’s where web design comes in.

Potential customers want to see evidence your work lives up to expectations. They want to see signs that you’re trustworthy. They don’t want to see giant walls of text.

As such, your tradie website needs to be designed with this in mind. That can mean:

  • Lots of images of successful jobs
  • Navigation bars that help visitors research your various services
  • Clearly divided and sectioned web content
  • On-page customer reviews
  • Reducing clutter and highlighting key services
  • Banners featuring pictures of you – people like knowing who they’re inviting into their homes

Nowadays, these ideas are essentially web design 101 – most business sites have them.

However, few tradies do!

Our team has performed web design for tradesmen all over Melbourne. Over the years, we’ve figured out what appeals to your visitors. This allows us to design websites that are tailored for your intended customer wants to see.

The link between web design and clarity

Effective web design for tradies does much more than just look pretty – when done right, it also helps communicate your message.

We don’t just mean through images. Things like layout and the way pages are formatted help draw a visitor’s attention to certain things.

For example, if your tradie business has certain services or selling points you want to push, you can bring attention to them using your web design by:

  • Building site banners with it in mind
  • Linking to pages for said services and selling points whenever possible
  • Using images to bring attention to them
  • Isolating the relevant parts from the rest of the page (using colour, spacing or location)

With an unclear website, it’s easy for key parts of your message to get lost in a wall of text.

Go back the the list of ugly websites we linked above – a lot of the offenders use the exact same font for everything, with little to identify the most important information. Good luck finding anything useful from that!

Effective web design encourages phone calls

Web design covers much more than the colours, graphics and formatting of your website. It also has a role to play in encouraging phone calls from potential customers.

One part of web design is the way your website is laid out. In addition to where images and text sit relative to each other, it also includes:

  • Navigation bars
  • Directory pages
  • Calls-to-action
  • Placement of reviews
  • Ease-of-navigation

Each of these can shape the manner in which visitors see your site. When done well, it can lead visitors down a rabbit hole of sorts, absorbing information while being gently nudged towards picking up the phone.

Join us next time for part 2, where we talk about how web design for tradies impacts your SEO

It’s not 2002 – a basic site loaded with written copy won’t do the job anymore. If you want your digital marketing to succeed, you need to ensure your site uses effective web design.

These are just some of the ways web design for tradies can help your business build credibility with its customers.

However, that’s not the only way web design helps your tradie business!

While aesthetic appeal is an important part of iformat’s approach towards web design for tradies, it isn’t the only one. As an agency that specialises in SEO for tradesmen (read: getting you found online), we design websites for tradies with an eye towards ensuring your site features prominently on Google.

Join us next time as we discuss how web design influences your tradie site’s SEO!