Construction Website Design: Best Practices

In this post, we will cover important factors in construction website design. The main focus are User Experience (UX) best practices that help boost sales.

Build trust

Building trust is the ultimate goal for any website for the construction industry. Contrary to online stores, these sites don’t sell directly on the site itself. Instead, they facilitate a complex, long-term sale with many moving parts and stakeholders. The only constant requirement in this sales cycle is to show that a company can do the work and that they’re trustworthy.

In 1999, Jacob Nielsen identified the four ways of a website that communicate trustworthiness. They are:

• Comprehensive and Current Content
• Upfront Disclosure
• Design Quality
• Connection to the Rest of the Web.

Content is king

As far as best practices for construction websites go, it’s best to start with the fundamentals: the content.

You’re offering something that another person wants to buy. To be successful, you will have to clearly state your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) so that any other person can understand it.

The depth and length of the content are not the deciding factor in determining it’s quality. It varies from service to service and depends on the complexity and total cost of the service. Essentially, the more people are involved in that service, the more it costs, and the higher the risk, the more (in-depth) content a site needs.

Advice that still seems universally true is that it’s well worth blogging — both for SEO purposes and to build trust with a client base.

Provide clear, upfront, and valuable information.

It pays to be strategic and thorough for this. Follow basic rules like leading with the most important points, writing in a professional tone, being as transparent as possible, and trying to offer value beyond the sale.

It’s usually a good idea to hire a copywriter with experience in the construction industry. As far as building websites goes, content is the hardest part to nail. We’re a strong proponent of running tests for your content over an extended time (link to continuous improvement).

Always remember that your website content will make your phone ring. Everything else ensures that qualified prospects read it.

Show pricing scenarios to get a competitive advantage.

Showing prices on construction websites is a polarizing topic. There are very good reasons against it:

• Construction services are highly complex and, therefore, hard to estimate. There is no generic one-size-fits-all price.
• Companies in this space usually don’t want their competitors to see their prices.
• Some companies want to be measured by their services first, not by their cost. (Although a price is a primary indicator of quality. That’s just how the human mind works.)

In our opinion, these are all valid reasons. It is backed up by the fact that almost no construction websites show any prices at all.

But that’s a mistake. Thankfully, it also provides an opportunity for companies who display that information.

We have seen time and time again that prices are an important data point for people to judge the quality of an offering and set expectations.

The cost of the service is also at the forefront of things prospects want to know. Showing prices upfront significantly reduces anxiety within complex buying cycles. As we have seen in previous posts, reducing anxiety for buyers becomes more important, the bigger the purchase is.

How to do it right

The best way to show prices for construction services is with typical scenarios and ranges. That can be as simple as showing the difference between the most basic and most premium service. That results in a price range. It also distinguishes “mandatory” services from optional upgrades.

This way, the competition does not gain any insight they should not already have. Most likely, the price range will be close to the industry standard. While other players in the industry already know the appropriate pricing for this service, most buyers don’t. It removes anxiety from potential buyers, builds trust, and makes it more likely for prospects to reach out.

Design Quality

Design quality ensures a well-organized site and appropriate color scheme and imagery.

The key is to understand the user’s mental models. That is a fancy word to describe how the ideal user thinks about the service before visiting a company’s website. It includes expectations of colors and visual design, how the navigation is “supposed to” work, where they expect to find key information, how the content is supposed to sound, and what value they expect from the site in general.

This very complex topic would require a full library of books to cover entirely. But the points listed below are a great starting point.

Tone down the visual design.

We see many construction website designs with an overload of colors — often orange combined with dark greys. Instead, a website should be a canvas that highlights the content. Use plenty of white space that will help highlight the most important info. It will also increase the site’s readability and prevent a new visitor from becoming overwhelmed by too many visual elements. The orange/grey color scheme can still be used — but sparingly.

The visuals are only supposed to assist the key messages. Above all, a website should always emphasize looking professional and never try to be different just to be different.

A lot more goes into the visual design part. For instance, how color schemes affect the perceived value of the business. Or how typography affects the authority of the content. There are many aspects like these that require a skilled designer to lead a company through the visual design to make appropriate decisions.

Make it easy to use

User Experience Design (UX) is the biggest struggle in construction website design. A site should always be judged from the user’s perspective first, not from the companies point of view:

• Is the content clear and relevant?
• Is it easy for users to achieve their goals? What are the goals in the first place?
• Does the site load fast? People don’t wait for pages to load anymore. In times of high-speed internet, they expect sites to respond quickly. If it doesn’t load in less than three seconds, they will leave — even though the content may have been relevant.

Information Scent

Are navigation labels easy to understand? Do links lead to pages that the user expected? Is it easy to navigate the page and find the desired information fast? How many visitors land on pages within the site that don’t answer any of their questions?

Accessibility

Is the site accessible for people with disabilities? Some common disabilities to think about are:

Dyslexia (5%-15% of all Americans): a learning disability that makes it difficult to read.

Significant visual impairment (3% of Americans): These are users who rely on increasing the font size on websites, for instance.

Color-blindness (8% of all men.) That affects if they can see buttons, text, or other elements in certain color combinations.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most neglected user problems on modern B2B websites. It directly affects at least 10% of any website’s user base. It also disproportionally affects older users, who tend to be key decision-makers. Neglecting to keep websites accessible harms a lot of businesses. Thankfully, there are simple plugins, that can address these issues very quickly and without much cost. There are few things with such a high and immediate Return-On-Investment as this.

Mobile-friendliness

How does the site look on a mobile phone? Phones and tablets are the primary ways people browse construction websites nowadays. We advise to build websites for small screens first and expand the website to a full computer view after. The edge case websites construction websites have to be built for is this: A website that is easy to read and navigate when the user is outside (on a construction site), in full daylight, with a highly reflective display set to 50% brightness. For this reason, we are staunch opponents of dark backgrounds with white text for construction websites.

A construction website is supposed to be easy to use, easy to understand, and easy on the eyes — on the phone in broad daylight.

Connection to the rest of the web: Don’t reinvent the wheel.

People spend more than 99% of their time outside of any website that is not Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, or Netflix. Once they enter a new site, they don’t want to “learn” how it works. Therefore, it needs to work like any other page on the internet by following UX best practices.

A site needs to meet user expectations of how the site is “supposed to work” in terms of main navigation, links, content, etc.

Clear CTAs that fit into the conversion funnel

Calls-To-Action (CTA) are the parts on a website that directly ask a user to take action towards becoming a buyer (“Contact Us”, “Request a Demo”, “Read the white paper”, etc.). While almost all websites have some, most CTAs are relatively ineffective. This is is not as much about building trust, as it is about capitalizing on that trust.

To be effective, CTAs need to tie into the conversion funnel of the website strategically. After identifying the best first action for a new user, an identical CTA should be:

• Placed in the same location on all pages. Usually above the footer at the bottom of the page.
• On all pages within a new user’s conversion path.

It does make sense to have different CTAs for different personas (in different stages of the buying process). But they should always:

• Look different and be clearly distinguished from each other. Don’t just change the color, but the entire layout and function.
• Be in different locations on the page.

Some good examples of CTAs can be found in Wordstream’s post: 11 Kick-Ass Call to Action Examples (And Why They Work).

Conclusion

An effective construction website design isn’t hard. At least as long as it starts with understanding the user’s goals and expectations.

Any web agency can build a website that will work and look good. Still, few agencies bring a good understanding of the industry and its values, language, and visuals to the table. Only that knowledge will result in sales growth and strong brand recognition.

In the next post, we will take a look at Website Design for Contractors.

Originally published at https://richterdesignservices.com on August 3, 2020.