FP Best practices, portfolios, and the “me too” phenomenon is all over the place. But we don’t give a shit.
We don’t give a shit about sliders, carousels, or whether or not you choose to use WordPress.
We don’t give a shit about how many pages you think you need on your website or whether you intend to use illustrations or stock photos.
Breakpoints, CSS, bootstraps, themes, graphics, content, layouts, and hosting — we don’t give a shit.
Don’t get us wrong, we do care about all that. Web design best practices are all that we follow. But, we don’t give a shit.
We care about your success. We want your website to be a part of a holistic, well-developed digital strategy. There’s something to be said about agencies, freelancers, employees, vendors, and partners who don’t care about themselves; instead, they care about you.
Freelancers and agencies set up shop to make money. You want a website, they’ll deliver. You’ll ask for some revisions and they’ll happily do those changes for you.
What most businesses don’t understand is that the success of their web presence only “starts” with a website (and it doesn’t end there).
In fact, we are willing to bet that most businesses don’t even sit through and think about why they want a website, what they intend to achieve with it, and how they want to use their website as a part of their digital marketing & measurement model, as Avinash Kaushik — author, digital marketing evangelist, and co-founder at Market Motive — explains.
For most businesses looking for unique web design, they don’t get anything unique. In fact, for most cases, it’s a complete nightmare for clients while it’s just another day with a few pixels, code, pages, and graphics for agencies or freelancers.
Commoditization is the global reality when it comes to web design. That’s why it makes sense to profit from the weird. So much that there’s a complete disconnect between what clients really want and what they get at the end of the day.
Clients want results.
They just get a few pages on a website (maybe a form comes included while adding a blog is available for extra pay).
You already know that you get what you pay for. While X% of businesses still don’t have websites, those that do don’t have their websites working for them in any manner. There isn’t a wow factor.
There’s nothing to make potential visitors to your website stop and take notice.
There’s nothing to attract.
Your website barely establishes your brand, or make your business stand out. You started your business to make money; your website isn’t getting the results you want.
Authenticity & uniqueness starts with you (not the website)
If you want to stand out among a billion or so websites and at least 200+ million businesses, you’d need to be authentic, unique, have a voice, and develop a character that your target audiences can relate to.
But the authenticity and uniqueness you need for your brand to stand out doesn’t come straight out of Philip Kotler’s famous marketing textbooks.
In a 2017 report by Cohn and Wolfe, it was found that more than a whopping 91% of consumers worldwide preferred to buy from or invest in brands that are authentic.
And what makes a brand authentic, you ask? The agency surmised that consumers believed brands are authentic when they are:
- Reliable
- Respectful, and
- Real
The search for what makes you a brand must start with you, as an entrepreneur.
As such, your website must be able to “show and tell” really fast. Starting with:
- Creating a brand persona and then a customer persona: Who are you? Why are you doing what you do? What makes you so special? Then, ask questions such as who exactly is your customer? What kind of language do they speak? What do they like to do?
- Highlight yourself, from outside in: While you’ll make the efforts to be relatable, likable, and approachable, don’t brag. Do put the spotlight on your brand but you’d have to stick within the confines of “What’s in it for me?”.
- Appeal to their emotions: The singular target of building unique, bold, or even functional websites (along with the rest of the marketing paraphernalia) is to appeal to emotions of casual visitors, potential customers, and others. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean that you can resort to empty and hollow promises.
- Clarity and flow: Within the first five seconds, your website visitors should know who you are, what you do, and how you can help them. That’s why it important it is to focus on the right elements as you design your website and get to the point quickly.
Needless to say, you can’t expect this level of work from your friendly neighborhood designer who’ll create 6 pages full of nothing but sliders and lorem ipsum.
You have to work with a company that cares.
Stand out or be left out
Did you know that the human brains can process visuals in as less as 13 milliseconds? The human brain has hundreds of millions of neurons that process visuals and they take up about 30% of the human brain’s primary cortex (while neurons that process touch occupy 8% and another 3% of neurons are meant for hearing), according to Seyens.
Humans are visual.
We think, plan, understand, and execute visually (more than anything else). We even make decisions visually.
We do make mistakes when trying to determine whether or not a website is “good” or “bad”. Our decisions with regards to websites being “good” or “bad” are largely visual in natural.
If it looks good, it’s enough for most of us.
But looking good, looking “pretty”, and looking “gorgeous” has nothing to do with why you have a website in the first place.
You aren’t in a beauty contest unless the only reason why you created the website was to be on the Awwwards homepage or for an ego boost on Behance.
Beautiful website design is a “nice to have” thing.
If your website looks pretty (and nothing else), your business is suddenly like any of the Billion+ websites that are live as we write this.
Today, you have technology to back you up too. For instance:
- You can display your prices in the local pricing of your visiting potential customers
- Your website can adopt and show different content, depending on who is visiting. Using personalization, you can also call out visitors by their name or make specific offers (or not) depending on the stage of the digital marketing funnel your visitors are on with regards to your business.
- The elements on your web pages, the layout, the structure of the site, and everything else on your site can in line with your overall strategy. Together with your regular work that goes into content strategy, paid marketing strategy, your website design should work in tandem with your marketing efforts to get you the results you seek.
At FP, that’s our strategy. We don’t just design websites or apps. We work with you to create and execute your marketing strategy (depending on your business) in a way where your website plays a key part.
Go bold & push the envelope
“If any of you have a desire to be mediocre, you will probably find that you have already achieved your ambition.”
~ Hugh Brown
We can agree with this: Aiming for mediocrity? You don’t have have to try. You’ll achieve it while sleeping.
However, It’s when you want to go bold, make an impression that lasts that’d you have to put in much more work, take that much more effort, and go through enough pain to do better.
This is what we want to achieve at Fermented Pixels. We serve the brave. We don’t want to create “another website for you”.
While we aren’t limited to designing websites or designing apps for any specific industry, we are the agency you’d need when you want something custom, bold, and something that pushes the envelope a bit.
Want to go crazy? Want to stand out? Dare to think outside the box? That’s when you should talk to us.
At FP, we challenge our clients to do something out of their comfort zone. For us it’s all about blending the “Wow factor” and “uniqueness” to “website functionality, search crawlability, lean structure, and fast speeds” to help get you results.
Need a website? You forgot about passion as a requisite
Most website design agencies seek clients to keep their lights on, to pay for their overheads, and for keeping their own businesses up and running. Everything they do, they do it for themselves (websites or apps are just a set of services they provide). In the end, they design websites that are just that: websites. Most of these websites suck.
That’s their focus. That’s how they survive. Mostly, there’s no passion; there’s just a determination to thrive.
Passion is requisite for website design but not many people actually look out for it (all the while saying that it’s important).
When startup entrepreneurs look for new people for their team, they look for “passion”. However, the reality is that most people are hired regardless of the level of passion they have because businesses need people and not everyone is a hyper-energetic bunny.
That’s exactly what happens when businesses go looking for help when it comes to website design, digital strategy, or app design. They’ll hire the first vendor, partner, freelancer, full-time hire, or an agency who is “good enough to get this done”.
When it comes to building unique website designs that actually get results, you need to move beyond the portfolio.
Unless you chat, talk, call, or meet your future design agency, you’ll miss out on the key ingredient to make your website work: passion.
Website design isn’t just about design; it’s about making sure that your entrepreneurial passion reflects in the design, the content strategy, and what you intend to achieve with your website.
Your design partners need to “feel your love”. That energy needs to rub off on your potential design agency.
A bunch of forms or a chatbot can’t do that.
We aren’t just forms, bots, or “leave a message”. We work as in-house partners to get you where you want to go.
