Your company’s website is one its most valuable marketing assets. Whether it’s through driving conversions and revenue or supporting overall brand awareness, it plays a vital role in how your organisation interacts with your audience. No wonder it pays to dividends to work with experts who are proficient when it comes to professional custom website design.
To maximise the UX of your site, you’ll need a CMS you can rely on, to enable your team to provide consistent and positive interactions with your customers. When executed effectively, it can help with several important actions, such as automating menial tasks to optimise your marketing funnels, as well as enforcing your brand style guide. The end result should be a sophisticated and practical tool for creating and managing all your online content.
So, whether you’re a rapidly-growing small business or a large digital media-publishing enterprise with multiple channels, ensuring that your site creates positive experiences for your users and eliminates any frustrations is essential to supporting your brand online. Intuitive designs and personalized content are now a prerequisite for a successful brand in many sectors and your choice in CMS is critical in enabling your team to get this right.
Enforce your brand style guide
Building brand consistency is an important part of any business. It’s also something that should be automated whenever possible. Assuming that you’ve developed an overall style guide to convey your company values, you should make sure this is enforced across your website through your CMS.
The last thing you want is for your company image to be damaged through inconsistency. This can sometimes happen if human error or too much freedom during the editorial process leads to poor execution of branding. Things like recurrent design elements, fonts, colours, images, logos, animations and even how much whitespace is used on each page can all be automated through your CMS, saving your marketing team from performing these actions themselves.
Brand consistency isn’t just about the visual graphics displayed on your CMS. It also refers to your site’s tone of voice and information architecture. With a custom-built CMS and bespoke WordPress theme, you can design the set-up of your CMS to enable your marketing teams to create compelling narratives that fit your brand’s story and provide consistency across the UX and visuals. This also means helping people easily take specific actions on your site or directing them to actions you want them to take.
For instance, if you are a company that focuses on simplicity and reducing complexity, your CMS should help to convey this through your site’s navigation and visual layout. A site with long load times, broken links and confusing navigation is only going to give your audience the opposite impression.
Remember, the more content you publish, or number of sites you manage under one umbrella brand, the more important it is to consider how you can enforce your brand style guide across your platforms. Your CMS can act as a central hub for distributing content across multiple channels, providing a clear editorial workflow that simplifies the process.
Learn more about supporting your online presence with custom-built WordPress themes and bespoke CMS designs with Powered By Coffee.
Content personalisation
Not everything on your site will be equally important to your audience. Whether it’s your service pages or links to your specific call to actions (CTAs) like a newsletter sign up form, you’ll need to put more focus on certain elements for specific users. This can sometimes be achieved by decluttering non-essential aspects of your site or highlighting the most important areas for certain demographics with engaging graphics, layout priority or link suggestions.
Integrating hyperlink differentiation is an easy way for you to prioritise the most relevant content for your audience. Whether it’s suggested product links based on their previous sales items, or related media content published on partner sites, integrating certain CMS features to optimise how information is presented can have a huge impact on the experience users have.
If organisations can’t deliver meaningful and relevant experiences, customers are more likely to look elsewhere for their content. Removing generic promotions, links and pop-ups can also help here. A misguided recommendation for instance can be avoided with the right CMS in place to help your marketing team deliver the information that matters to your online target audience.
Commercial functionality
Your site will always have to serve its primary function as a commercial tool to be a success. This is just as relevant if you are an e-commerce platform or simply boosting your company’s conversion rates through your website UX. Creating a CMS system that supports this functionality should be at the front of your mind when developing your website, regardless of whether you use WordPress, Drupal CMS, Adobe Experience Manager or any other platform.
This means making sure your marketing team is performing as efficiently as it can, through the automation of various marketing actions. There are a number of iterations that should not be handled by individuals manually in order to save your team a huge amount of time. Consider things like image optimisation, product descriptions, tagging and categorisation. These are all things that your CMS can help automate if designed right.
Also, the SEO-optimization of your site can be improved through your CMS, taking some of the burden away from individuals in your marketing team when writing or uploading editorial content. A well-designed plug-in can be implemented that allows you to easily optimise titles, meta descriptions and links so that content has the best chance of ranking well.
Find out how to improve the user experience of your e-commerce visitors with a custom-built CMS and WordPress theme from Powered By Coffee.
Don’t let a poorly-implemented CMS damage your brand
There are some important CMS mistakes that every business should avoid. While they might seem like small things on the surface, together they make up the overall experience users have when visiting your site and can greatly damage your brand. Here are some major barriers that impact the growth of your online presence.
1. Slow load times
It has been proven that latency is crucial to online interactivity and engagement. Google themselves found that an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20 per cent. One of the simplest ways to eliminate user frustrations on your site is to optimise your page load speeds. Whether it’s by compressing large image files or reducing the number of elements that are included on each page, your website can be tweaked to offer a smoother and more enjoyable user experience.
2. Visual inconsistency
Websites are incredibly visual – creating a guide for integrating which graphics should (and shouldn’t) be used on your CMS will help to create an all-important brand consistency. This will help you to avoid elements that might look out of place, such as photographs, text fonts, logo colours and product description formats.
3. Broken links and errors
Broken links and errors are not only bad for your site’s UX, but can also have a significant impact on your SEO. As well as disappointing users with what can seem like lazy organisation and maintenance, Google also registers these mistakes as its web crawlers collect data about your site. Your CMS can help you here by flagging up these errors or optimising the link-building process in the first place.
4. Confusing navigation
Helping visitors access the information they need as soon as possible will go a long way in improving their user experience. This can mean organising your site map and navigation with the help of your CMS development team, so it works logically. You should also consider things like internal linking to FAQs, smoothly-integrated CTAs that bring customers directly to purchase pages and sign-up forms, or perhaps customer support pages that connect users with your company’s customer support staff.
5. Poor user feedback
Gathering and reacting to customer feedback is key to adapting your business to suit your customer’s needs. In order to translate user feedback into tangible actions that can improve your UX or even your commercial products and services, you’ll need a well-structured approach to gathering and processing this information. Your CMS can help here. If you fail to act on such information, you could risk losing customers and damaging your brand’s integrity.
6. Out-of-date content
Certain platforms rely on current and up-to-date content as the backbone of their brand. Whether you’re a publishing platform that delivers new trends and analysis to your users or an e-commerce fashion outlet, you’ll need to make sure your site is exhibiting only the most relevant content. Redundant, trivial or out-of-date content should be flagged or automatically removed from your site through your CMS.
Final thoughts
When you are planning your content management system and working with your UX designer or website development team, it is always important to consider your company’s branding and how it will be impacted by your decisions. In short, your CMS must function as both a tool for performing commercial actions, as well as the face of your business and the hub for many of your digital marketing activities.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can support your brand through a viable CMS, get in touch with Powered By Coffee. Whether it’s through building a custom CMS for your specific operational requirements or developing bespoke themes and plugins, we can help you craft a website that improves the way your audience interacts with your business.
