Your unique selling proposition (USP) defines your business in terms that your clients understand. To effectively communicate this message, you must already have defined your target market and identified the needs that your offerings fulfill and the problems they solve. You must be able to convey how you make your clients’ lives easier.

When you have pinpointed the ways that your offerings free up time for your clients to focus on running their businesses and the ways that they relieve stress and eliminate cause for worry, you will have defined your unique selling proposition.

Defining your unique selling proposition is an essential step in creating an effective business website. It allows visitors to identify with your products and services.”

Effective Web Design

Taking time to develop your brand through various exercises enables you to distill your marketing messages into simple terms. Your new challenge is delivering this message in a way that effectively attracts clients to your business.

Three seconds is all the time you have to make a favorable impression on your audience, an impression that will capture their attention long enough to explore the rest of your website. To be effective, your message must be delivered quickly. If the visitor fails to recognize that you provide a solution to their problem within a few seconds, they will go somewhere else.

Focus

In the process of developing a brand, we define the target market, identify objectives,  and pinpoint the unique selling proposition. Once these criteria have been established, we apply them to the web site design. If we were to study the most effective web sites, we would notice that these criteria – the target market, the brand objectives, and the unique selling proposition – are apparent in the prominent elements of the site.

Design Elements – Layout

The layout, or positioning of information on a page, indicates the importance of each element. Effective web design utilizes different fonts and colors in title headings in order to attract attention. This helps visitors recognize what is important and allows them to easily find what they are looking for.

Dividing the information into columns across a page helps visitors take in more information, especially when highlighted by descriptive headings and abbreviated text with buttons to “learn more.” This type of layout allows visitors to quickly glance over three or four options and the invites them to learn more about the solutions that best fit their problem.

Rules for Page Uniformity

To effectively market your brand, each individual page must be effective and all pages must be consistent in the overriding brand message. Here are some specific questions to ask when developing your web page design:

• Is the web page laid out in a way that places focus on the products and/or services?
• Are the most important elements the most prominent?
• Are the elements at the top of the page more important that those at the bottom of the page?
• Do the images convey the message effectively?
• Does the content communicate the brand objectives including the unique selling proposition?

Other Design Elements

Your basic design elements are the first things your visitors see when they visit any page of your website. These elements will establish the overall tone of your website and should capture the essence of your online brand.

• Website banner with logo and tagline
• Tagline that clearly communicates primary business focus and unique selling proposition
• Page navigation that is user friendly and uses terminology common among target market
• Consistency in color, images and design elements throughout web presence

Your Unique Selling Proposition

Defining your unique selling proposition is an essential step in creating an effective business website. It allows visitors to identify with your products and services. Providing a clear message helps them understand how your business solves their problems. Effective web design gets this across to your visitors quickly, establishing the position of your online brand.