CASE STUDY: Amazon, Apple, and Tesla Web Design
When mobility and travel become increasingly difficult, the trend is to buy online.
According to the Financial Times, the list of winning companies during the pandemic is headed by Amazon, followed by Microsoft, Apple and Tesla.
What is the secret of this success?
It really is something simple to explain, a robust online sales strategy and a clear commitment to an excellent design of their websites has helped them to place themselves in the first positions of winners.
According to this same source, 65% of the companies that occupy the list are from the US,
What have they done differently?
In the first place, the common denominator of these companies is the strength of their culture in branding, advertising, and marketing, as well as the teams that manage it. Flexible and agile teams that understand the advantage of digitization and have been able to adapt quickly to maintain and even increase their growth.
Another factor that has allowed them to reach winning positions during the pandemic is the initial approach, they were not limited to having a mediocre presence on the networks, but on the contrary and based on a solid strategy they have built websites that pursue excellence and hence success.
In the case of Amazon, above all, the optimization of all its resources, its meticulous strategy with all the UX and UI details, among others, and added to the combination of other marketing tools, have allowed them to grow and increase their business in the most difficult moments of a global economic crisis.
Currently, many companies offer website construction services, fake gurus, and in the worst case, websites managed with CMS like WordPress.
Dozens of companies and multinationals are unaware of the inefficiency and inefficiency of their websites because they do not have the knowledge, qualified personnel within their teams, or consultants to advise them with solid criteria to help them solve their problems in the digital world.
Fake web service companies
Today there are simple tools that allow you to "build websites" in a few hours. But a tool like WordPress doesn't make you a designer, like putting on a cape doesn't make you Superman.
Would you put on a cape and jump out the window?
Would you put the investment you have made to build your business in the hands of someone who would jump out the window with a cape?
If you answered "yes" to either of these two questions, you have a problem and you don't know it. I will explain why:
Dozens of reasons not to use WordPress
The famous CMS is used by a large part of websites, about 30% are built with WordPress, where amateurs use generic predesigned templates to represent their company.
One of the arguments that charlatans use to sell you a WordPress site is that important companies such as Adobe Blogs, Walt Disney, or The New Yorker use this CMS that was created to make blogs.
But this is a cheap trick since behind the development of this type of website there are dozens of programming and design professionals who have nothing to do with the web that you can make at home or that a freelancer or a company of the 300K that arise each financial crisis, will make you for 400 USD.
This, obviously, is the complete opposite of what a true branding expert would recommend, for various reasons and basic branding principles as explained in previous posts such as How to make branding? or Would you trust your mechanic to perform a heart operation? Professional intrusion.
Branding is a tool that helps us differentiate our brand and/or product and make us special, but if we start from the basis that the design of your cosmetics website, for example, will use the same design that the butcher uses, then something is wrong, there is no a mechanism focused on meeting specific objectives.
It is confusing, as it would be that milk will use the same packaging design as ketchup or toothpaste the same packaging as hemorrhoid cream.
WordPress, being so popular among users around the world, is a great target for hackers, becoming the most insecure CMS, also, as the plugins it uses are developed in most cases by amateurs or unqualified professionals, they often create code conflicts, bugs, and malfunctions, obsolescence and in the worst case, when they include malware and infect the website and visitors with viruses.
This is not the image that a brand needs, building a brand costs a lot of money, to leave it in the hands of amateurs or try to make it yourself and lose only one of our sales opportunities.
If you make your own website yourself without knowing it, it is a bad investment in any case, but even worse is to trust companies that promise to build a website for a very low price, because you will be paying to have a mediocre website that is not worth a bit money you paid for it, it's like Monopoly money.
False professionals, in this case, false gurus of SEO, web design, the promises of hundreds of visits to your website ... are expensive, professional intrusion, as I mentioned in the previous post, is a very effective way to waste money. business money.
But my company already makes money! I don't need to invest in a new website:
- My company has a website made with WordPress and we invoice 1 million dollars every year!
- That's because you don't know that if your website were developed by true professionals, you would be billed more than 5 million dollars a year.
As is logical, for those who are not professionally dedicated to this sector, it is difficult to differentiate a mediocre website from an excellent one, because they basically do not know how to measure it beyond what might seem like a "beautiful design", they do not know the tools that are in the market and beyond what the Google search engine can tell you.
Thinking that a website is valid because its design is beautiful, is like buying a painting because it matches the curtains or the sofa, with the difference that the painting is intended to decorate and our website is intended to represent our company (branding) to support or carry out sales (marketing) and in some cases to publicize new products or services, promotions, etc ... (advertising).
A good website starts from a solid architecture in different aspects that allow it to be born, grow and scale, without losing quality and functionality.
How to locate the charlatans?
A fake "web designer" will never talk to you about architecture, perhaps he will talk to you about cheap prices, do it yourself, how cheap it is going to be ... and we all already know that cheap is expensive, but these never tell you, they will never talk about architecture.
A good web architecture includes aspects such as the programming language necessary for each case, the structure and methodology of programming, as well as design, where beyond what is commonly thought, web design is not limited to making a beautiful website, the design also refers to its functionality and use.
If your favorite color is pink and they asked you to design a STOP sign and make it pink, with "cool" typography it would be great and super creative, or not, but it would be absolutely a bad design for losing its functionality, since the signage it has certain established and common codes in all countries.
Besides, good web architecture is designed so that the web is agile, fast, and intuitive, to make it accessible and to comply with international regulations such as CSS or the official standards of the most important search engines such as Google or Yahoo to allow our positioning. web and ensure its proper functioning on all devices.
There are many websites with a "super cool" design that do not pass the most basic functionality tests, where they use obsolete codes, residual code templates that will never be used but that negatively affect the user experience and therefore SEO, images without optimizing that either makes the web too slow or the images are not of sufficient quality and appear pixelated.
But not everything is this, on the web, many factors are important.
UI design
The user interface (UI) is focused on navigation and optimizing it to the maximum. Naturally, this can be summarized as follows:
"A good design"
But in Marketing, we love to put cool names to everything.
Although in reality, it also includes more varied aspects, since a good UI design starts as mentioned above from a structure based on a solid architecture previously studied and that is logical and intuitive for the user.
It is usually based on schemes and diagrams that study all the necessary elements that will appear on the web and how they will be accessed in a simple, fast, and logical way. There are also tools to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the UI design that helps us to analyze to be able to modify and optimize this part of our website.
A good UI design is the rational part of the web and helps us to keep users on our site, reinforce the image of the brand and transform visits into conversions.
UX design
While the UI is the rational part of our web design, the user experience is the emotional part, and it is as important as any of the rest of the elements of our web design.
But here I have to say the same thing again, although it is not just designed, the UX is still a good design, obviously functional for the purposes entrusted to it.
One of the biggest mistakes of current websites is that they are not optimized for browsing on mobile devices, today it represents 95% of accesses according to the MICITT.
But pages of large multinationals even in 2021 are not ready for mobile devices, something that Google strongly penalizes.
There are also many other important aspects, such as the use of video or sound, the use of pop-ups, scroll-jacking, accessibility for all users, the use of zoom, the location of the main elements, or the respect of the visual hierarchy, among many others, are elements of web design where a large part of websites make big mistakes.
Especially when we talk about self-made WordPress where users entertain themselves by changing colors or fonts without any professional criteria, handling kerning, leading and tracking is something that is studied, they are not accessible to everyone, making the user experience is a success or a failure and leaves the web for being annoying navigation.
For example, the autoplay of videos can be very annoying depending on the content we are accessing and where we are.
Copywriter
A couple of weeks ago, an industrial designer, one of those who are dedicated to making websites with WordPress and staunch advocates of DIY, wrote to me about creating some texts, but the term he used was "copyrighter".
At that time I thought that the autocorrect had played a trick on him, but he wrote it again several times to confirm his complete ignorance about it. It is not about the handling of a language where we can all make mistakes, it is about a sample of total ignorance of a profession that is practicing lacking any professional ethics.
My eyes started to cry blood...
This is one of the reasons why a professional copywriter is absolutely necessary to create the content of our website. The creation of content if it is not done by true professionals, will show an image of the lack of professionalism of our company.
The copy of our website is essential in the UI strategy, for example, to guide the user and also for the UX so that the user does not fall asleep visiting our website, making it attractive with relevant content and effective communication.
Also, the content will depend, to a large extent, on our SEO positioning, something that is often overlooked, and that makes the figure of the copywriter an essential agent in web development.
SEO
Currently, 92% of all searches come from Google.
75% of these users do not go beyond the first page.
There is a joke about this data:
- "Where would you bury something that you don't want anyone else to find? "
- "On the second page of Google."
Hence the importance for the positioning of our website, everything mentioned above will be essential for our SEO strategy. If you are not among the first search results, it is as if you are not, it is useless, zero.
For this reason, and especially now that mobility in almost all countries is reduced, being well positioned in search engines is essential to selling locally, but much more important if you want to do it on a global level.
The contents, the loading speed, the links, the tags, the keywords, etc ... are key aspects to position a website.
There are hundreds of theories and practices to achieve leadership, but only true professionals know the secrets and tools that allow positioning and leading, beyond what you can see in online tutorials of false gurus with expensive courses that promise millions of visits to your website and truculent positioning.
Programming
Each development has a different strategy depending on the needs and objectives. There are dozens of programming languages and frameworks, libraries, that speed up code development.
Some languages are used for the backend and others for the frontend, where the most common are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, although as I said you can find developments that use other languages such as JAVA, PHP, XML ...
As for the rest of the elements, a first phase is carried out for programming where the language to be used for the development of the project is decided.
Subsequently, the architecture that will define the structure of the site is designed.
It is common to see incorrect use of the programming language, a poorly made architecture that slows down the page and even gives functional problems. Once again, it is important that someone professional, qualified, takes care of the programming of the website.
Depending on the type of page it is, corporate website, online store, promotional page, blog, etc ... more programming resources, security levels, databases, and other important aspects are required for our website that we must not neglect
Conclusion
In addition to everything mentioned above, there are many more relevant aspects for the web such as the type of server we will use, its operating system, its hardware, location, service providers, complementary tools, and several dozen more choices that will determine whether our website It is mediocre or it is competitive and focused on excellence and therefore success.
I could write a book dedicated to this topic and possibly leave a lot of important data out since there are hundreds of things not so easy to explain in a post like this, they are knowledge and experiences acquired during 23 years that have certainly flown by.
At IGNITE Global Marketing, for an obvious matter of professional ethics, we never recommend leaving web design in the hands of unqualified people or companies.
Although it may seem like a very expensive investment, the reality is that a good website is absolutely profitable.
Sometimes we lose the opportunity to buy a good product because we do not ask the price, we think it will be expensive but in reality, it is not, it is better to ask and leave doubts.
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