Introduction
You’ve probably heard of the KISS acronym or the phrase it stands for: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Keeping it simple is exactly what auto glass companies want to do when it comes to their website.
But keeping it simple doesn’t mean just throwing up a one-page website with scant information just to give your business a presence on the Internet. Rather, it means keeping it simple for the visitors who land on your site by giving them a user experience that provides all the information they need to know to do business with you quickly and easily.
As a gauge of just how important your website is to your business, consider this figure from 2014 research conducted by MineWhat.com:
81% of shoppers research online before they decide where to make a purchase.
In other words, your website acts as a major salesperson for your business, so it needs to look, function, and provide what your potential customers are looking for, otherwise, they’ll move on to your competition.
This Ultimate Web Design Guide for Auto Glass Companies is designed to help you get started with your website, or if you currently have a site, then a redesign to ensure it’s meeting the needs of your potential and existing customers.
The guide is divided into five sections.
Section 1: Getting Started
Section 2: Mapping Out Your Web Pages
Section 3: Website Design
Section 4: Website Content
Section 5: Other Web Design Components
It guides you through the must-have components your website should include and provides tips on visuals, content, interactive tools, and other features that address the user’s experience while visiting your site.
Section 1: Getting Started
The first decision you need to make is whether you want to design or redesign your auto glass website yourself or hire a website designer.
If you do-it-yourself, there are numerous website builders you can use that offer website design templates for auto glass businesses. But, be aware that building a website from scratch can be very time-consuming.
If you’re short on time or not comfortable designing your own site, hire a website designer. To keep everything all under one roof, you might want to go with a digital marketing firm that will handle your website design, content, search engine optimization (SEO), and digital marketing initiatives.
Section 2: Mapping Out Your Web Pages
A website is comprised of a home page as the main navigation page, as well as additional web pages that contain consumer-focused information about your company and the products and services it offers.
Here’s where keeping it simple comes into play. Your web design should be easy to navigate with very few web pages. Beyond the home page, these web pages should be sufficient for an auto glass company:
- Products;
- Services;
- About Us;
- Contact Us/Directions, including an interactive map;
- Customer Reviews – That same MineWhat.com report finds that 61% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase;
- Warranty Information;
- Insurance Claim Information;
- Discounts, Promotions, Seasonal Specials, or Price Matching Information.
Section 3: Website Design
Web design is the overall look and workings of your website. It encompasses a lot of elements that all come together to function as the online presence of your business.
These elements include: appearance; type style; color scheme; images; functionality; navigation; and development.
Appearance
This is the first impression your website gives when a visitor clicks on it. People have short attention spans online and will quickly leave a site if they don’t like its appearance.
To keep visitors on your site and navigating its pages, your website’s appearance needs to follow these web design best practices:
Looks Good: The design of each web page that makes up your website should be visually appealing to draw in visitors. Using gradients and textures are two design techniques that achieve this by adding depth. Remember, the look of your website becomes part of your brand, so the design should be a reflection of that.
Squint Test: The site’s design should pass the squint test, meaning you can squint at the site and still understand that you’re on an auto glass company site.
Easy to Scan: Your site’s design structure makes it easy to quickly scan its web pages to find out what it is about, what you’re offering, and where to click to take action or get more information. If it takes more than 2 minutes to find this information, a visitor is likely to leave your site.
Has Focus: Your home page should focus on your auto glass services, with each accompanying web pages having a goal with their additional details. A well-focused site design uses header tags, block quotes, pull quotes, or images to draw attention to the most important information.
On each page of your site, make clear what the visitor’s next step should be. These goals should be clear and complemented with calls to action. Some examples for your auto glass site might be signing up for your e-mail newsletter, scheduling an appointment, or clicking for a special promotion.
The best practice is one call to action goal per page to allow visitors to focus on what’s most important. While the page can contain other buttons or links, they should be displayed in a way that clearly indicates they are not as important in value as the call to action.
Proper White Space: Use white space to achieve a simple, clean, clutter-free, and inviting design. This prevents visitors from getting overwhelmed with information and visuals.
Easy Navigation: Your site visitors won’t spend more than 10 seconds looking for contact information, a form, or promotions. Your website design should have clear navigation from all pages and have important information clearly visible. An auto glass company probably doesn’t need a search box on its site, but easy navigation around the pages is a must.
Follows the F-Shaped Pattern: The F-shaped pattern represents the way people’s eyes scan a page. So, your web design should feature the most important information at the top left corner of the page, which gets the most attention, and then moves across the page and down.
Not Overly Designed: An overloaded web design will overwhelm your visitors, so keep flash banners, a big navigation menu, and pop-ups and slide elements to a minimum. Their use should be dictated by user experience and reserved for the points on your website when visitors would actually need them.
Easy to Make Contact: The whole point of your website is to make it easy for potential customers to contact you. Incorporate your e-mail address and phone number on every page or be sure your Contact page is accessible on the navigation menu.
Type Style
The style and size of the type used on your website make all the difference in whether your website is welcoming to visitors.
A hard to read type style or type that is too small or too big to read will cause visitors to click off your site in a hurry.
The typeface used on your website should be web-friendly and not vary much in style.
The rule of thumb is no more than three different typefaces.
Be consistent throughout the site, with typeface variations occurring for the different type sizes used for headings and body text.
Color Scheme
If your auto glass business already has a color scheme, then that’s what should be used to design your website to maintain brand consistency.
Otherwise, the color scheme on your site should reflect the tone of your business and create a welcoming environment for your online visitors.
As a rule, limit your color scheme to two colors so as not to distract from the overall appearance of your website.
Here are some color scheme guidelines to help with your decision:
- Choose colors that blend well together, rather than clash with each other.
- Warm colors, like yellow, orange, and red, evoke excitement, memories, or a call to action.
- Cool colors, like blue, green, and purple, are more casual, soothing, and relaxing. They evoke sophistication.
- Keep in mind that some people are color blind, so design your color scheme accordingly. With calls to action or links, consider complementing the color with an underline or some type of icon.
Images
Images are great to draw in visitors, keep their attention, or direct them to a particular text section.
But images need to be professional, high quality, relatable, and serve a purpose. Rather than use stock photos, use actual photos taken of your business. Just be sure to get permission from employees or customers pictured in any photos.
Some other things to keep in mind about images:
- Limit the number of images on each web page so it doesn’t look too busy in appearance.
- Avoid staged photos; people can tell immediately they’re not authentic.
- Stay away from stock photos that you see everywhere on other companies’ websites or ad campaigns. You can use Google’s reverse image search to see which businesses are using the stock images you selected.
- Only use images that are relevant to your products and services.
- Keep text as text rather than turning text blocks into JPEG images.
Functionality
Functionality encompasses responsiveness, load times, and functions consumers will be performing, such as filling out a form or scheduling an appointment.
Functionality must-dos:
- Check the load time of your site. Certain elements of a website, like its background, images, or plug-ins, will make it load slower. Be sure your site’s design and coding take into consideration optimal speeds and that cascading style sheet (CSS) files are compressed.
- Generally, people will not wait more than 3 seconds for a site or page to load.
- Make the design of your site responsive to all devices, so whether visitors are accessing your site from a desktop computer or a mobile device, it’s going to look great and perform properly.
- Check for any page error messages during loading.
- If forms are part of your web design, make them simple to complete. Typically, people will not complete forms containing more than three items, so, if possible, request only name and e-mail.
Navigation
Navigation pertains to the way visitors move around your site. As such, your site’s main navigation should be easy to see, simple to figure out and easy to use.
On the other hand, depending on the complexity of your site in terms of pages, you want to avoid putting every web page into the main navigation.
Some navigation best practices are:
- Your main navigation should be limited to no more than five choices.
- If you need a sub-navigation menu, be sure the items are clearly categorized.
- Consider using images with a heading and short text for your site’s main navigation.
Development
Web development is how your site is built. It encompasses coding, indexing, browser compatibility, and other elements that make your site work.
Some key development tips are:
- Test your website in all major browsers, including their older versions, to be sure it’s functionality is compatible.
- Use scalable vector images instead of bitmap images, like JPG or PNG, to boost its speed and limit the versions needed to accommodate different mobile devices.
- Include only one main title for each page of your site to help define the hierarchy of your site, define navigation, and help boost SEO.
Most importantly, your website should be tested before it goes live. Every page, task, link, navigation flow, etc., that visitors will be interacting with should be tested to be sure it is working properly.
Just as auto glass is crisp and clear, so should the design of your website. But above all else, remember to keep it simple.
Section 4: Website Content
Here’s where you need to think like your consumer. Your content needs to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers to your auto glass business.
When writing content about windshield and window repair or replace, consider the information your website visitors want during the different stages of deciding to do business with you.
For example, you’ll have visitors who are doing some early research, others who are close to making a decision, and those who are ready to make a commitment and want to see what others are saying about your business.
You need to provide content for each stage of the consumer’s journey.
Consider this: What information would a consumer want to read from an auto glass website?
To help you answer this question, ask family or friends what type of information they would expect to find on your website.
From those ideas, you can either write the text yourself or hire a copywriter. If you are using a digital marketer, they usually have a copywriter on staff.
Website content tips:
- Keep text simple, short, and to the point.
- Stay away from using auto glass industry terms or jargon. If there’s no way around their usage, then be sure to clearly explain what they mean.
- Choose your words wisely, especially for calls to action.
- Avoid using buzzwords or trendy words and phrases; your content will become outdated pretty quickly.
- Use keywords where they naturally fit in so the content flows properly. Using a lot of keywords WILL NOT make your website rank higher. Actually, the opposite happens because search engines view it as keyword stuffing.
- Write content with the assumption that your visitors are not familiar or experienced with window or windshield repair or replacement.
- Write in a conversational tone, not a marketing or sales pitch tone. When writing your website text, imagine yourself talking with your neighbor and write in that manner. However, be sure to come across as an authority in the auto glass industry.
- If you are stating statistics, be sure to cite their source.
- Develop a tone or personality for your business or brand and let it come through the content.
In addition to having great content that visitors to your site will read and is search engine friendly, it also needs to be presented in a way that is welcoming to read.
Website content design tips:
- Content should be in a structured layout, such as a column or grid format, and be uniform across all web pages.
- Use typefaces and sizes that are easy to read.
- Make content quick and easy to scan by using subheads, bulleted or numbered lists, and short paragraphs of one or two sentences.
- Content should be uncluttered on the page and have plenty of white space for easy reading.
- Emphasize important phrases in bold type or underline.
- Complement your content with images or graphs, but only if they add something to the content.
- Important content, like your phone number, should be designed to stand out from everything else on the page.
- The design of your website should complement your text, putting it at center stage rather than taking away from it.
Section 5: Other Web Design Components
Your website doesn’t need to be super fancy and it probably doesn’t need an online quoting system unless that’s a key part of your process. But you may want to consider online appointment scheduling, especially if your competitors offer the feature, as well as videos and interactive tools that enhance the visitor’s experience while on your site.
Essential web design components:
- Local SEO: This ensures your website gets ranked in the location(s) your business serves.
- Keywords: These keywords should be those that people in your area(s) would use to search for auto glass companies.
- Links: Your website needs to be linked to your online business listings, as well as your social media platforms, to provide a seamless experience.
- Photo Galleries or Slideshows: These images can showcase your work in a before and after presentation.
- Custom Favicon: This is an icon with your brand that is displayed on the tab of a web browser page. This enables visitors who have numerous tabs open in their web browser because they are doing some comparison shopping to navigate back to your website.
As this Ultimate Web Design Guide for Auto Glass Companies shows, your website is the foundation of your online marketing efforts. And since your auto glass company isn’t just another auto glass shop, your website should uniquely differentiate your online presence from the competition.
Take some time to boost your online presence and your company’s bottom line with a new or redesigned website.