Picture, if you will, a young lady named Deborah.
Deborah is in dire need of a plumber, and this arises in conversation with her friend Barb. Barb recommends “OG Plumbing Service” because her friend Susan first recommended that service to her. Deborah has never heard of “OG Plumbing Service” and immediately whips out her smartphone to check out their website. Before her first scroll, Deborah has spotted three typos. As she thumbs her way down the page, she notices broken links and overlapping sections that make the text hard to read. Frankly, it’s giving her a headache. She closes her browser app and puts her phone away, and returns to her conversation with Barb.
In this scenario, word of mouth successfully carried “OG Plumbing Service” to the ears of a potential customer. However, in the fifteen to twenty seconds that Deborah spent looking at our fictional website, she became confused – if not irritated – by the number of aesthetic and functional problems that were present on that site. “OG Plumbing Service” may well be one of the top service providers in the immediate area, but the sad reality is that Deborah is unlikely to call them. Why? Because their website was Deborah’s first impression, and they failed to impress.
In an increasingly digital culture, websites have replaced pamphlets. Fifteen to twenty seconds may be the difference between a new customer or a bad reputation. This is why immaculate website quality must be assured by your web design team. At Compulse Integrated Marketing, we employ a skilled quality assurance team that audits every site that we’ve built before launch to be sure that our clients are being well represented. To be sure that each site is optimized for user conversion, we put intensive focus on four key elements.
Mobile Responsiveness
Recent studies have proven that 58% of your website traffic came from mobile devices in 2018. If your site deploys an analytics tool such as Google Analytics to monitor site traffic by device, you are likely to see that the rate of mobile usage is even higher this year. People are all but surgically attached to their smartphones, and that means that your website has to be accessible to the mobile user. ‘Mobile Responsiveness’ refers to a website’s ability to adapt to the screen size of the user. Our quality assurance team runs tests through both physical devices and device emulators to be sure that the web experience is just as smooth for a user on a six-year-old Android phone as it would be for a user on a brand-new MacBook.
Website Functionality
Does your website accept bill payments or user submissions? Are animations on the webpage triggered by user input? Does a waterfall of Facebook posts populate your website footer? Little bells and whistles such as these can not only alleviate some of the daily tasks of running your business, but also work towards improving your professional image. However, if these functions are “buggy” or “broken”, they achieve neither goal and instead deter the user. Quality assurance tests every field of every form and inspects every functional element on page to be sure that the site functions smoothly and that one function does not create a conflict with any others.
Visual Aesthetic
Red text on a green background might sound like a fetching holiday combination on paper; but on a website, you may wind up causing a bad case of eye strain with that combination. In a similar vein, if you have a paragraph of text content that overlaps with the next section, color coordination may cause the overlapping section to become harder to read. This is why attention to detail is so critically important. Our quality assurance team works hard to be sure that your website’s visual aesthetic gives potential customers digestible images and service information – and not a headache!
Spelling & Grammar
It should go without saying that if your website claims to represent your ‘Porfessional Services’, you are unlikely to see much conversion. Even a web team as polished as ours can make the occasional typo, which is why our quality assurance team puts a second and sometimes third set of eyes on every site build to be sure that none of those little mistakes slip through.
Remember that prospective customers like Deborah will only give you about fifteen seconds to make an impression. You’ve dedicated long hours and made countless investments into your business, brand or service offering to make it marketable. You need to be able to lean on your website to do some of the marketing that you can’t, so that you can focus on continuing to serve the customers and clients with the services that you’re advertising. You can’t have a website with bugs, errors or aesthetic problems that distract the user from what you have to offer. So, when selecting a new web partner, be sure to ask – is your website’s quality going to be assured?
Compulse Integrated Marketing builds websites from the ground up with designs, functionalities and analytical tools that are customized for each client and intensely audited by our quality assurance team prior to launch. If you think that you might be interested in a custom web project, we’d love to talk with you about the possibilities. Contact us today!