Web Design

You never get a second chance at a first impression, so if your current website design is just like any other, then what does that say about your brand? In this highly saturated marketplace of generics and copycats, your website needs to stand out from the crowd. Our web designers can take your website beyond what you ever thought possible, ensuring your audience are nothing but excited, encouraged and enthralled.

The Importance of Strategic Design

We know templates can be tempting, but we believe that trust is built on the backbone of your website. If your layout is lacking, it’s difficult to navigate and your call to action (CTA’s) aren’t converting, then no matter how brilliant your message, values and offering are, they’ll be lost. Good design matters as it reflects your brand, personality and audience and indicates how well you do business. First impressions count after all.

At Embryo, we get to the heart of who you are and the audience you want to attract, ensuring continuity between your website’s aesthetic, functionality and responsiveness. Through extensive research and top-level artistry, we create designs that boost traffic, generate leads and make your audience come back for more.

What Does Our Web Design Process Involve?

We’ll be your website experts, strategising every step of the design process from the initial concept and mockup to creating a user journey with a call to action sure to engage your audience. First, we’ll create a design brief based on a collaborative discussion of your goals, target audience and brand, ensuring we understand exactly who you and your audience are, and what you want them to say about your website. Creating the sitemap, we’ll select colour palettes that complement your branding. We’ll help you decide the main services to promote and which specific features such as mega menus and sticky navigation to integrate. All of our designs are created with development in mind.

We’ll use competitor research to find website features you love and build on this to create a better user experience (UX) for your audience. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is also extremely important, so we’ll ensure contact forms and CTA’s are vibrant and grab your audience’s attention. We’ll then create a mockup of your new website and present it to you, and when you’re happy and have signed it off, we’ll push it through to development.

 

What Makes Our Designs Different?

We don’t believe in templates. Each of our website designs are created with the client, and their audience, market and unique branding in mind.

We place great importance on UX and UI, as they motivate customers to create an account, become a subscriber, fill out a form or purchase a product.

Our strategic process prioritises research-based creativity, with proven successes in markets spanning cosmetic surgery, real estate, insurance and roofing for example.

Our account managers are proactive, forward-thinking individuals. They’ll ensure you’re kept up to date on your designs, feel comfortable giving feedback and are completely happy with the final design.

Whatever your goal, your web designs will be built with that in mind.

Branding with Colour and Style

With the right web design, you can begin to boost your brand recognition the moment a user enters your website. Colour can be a powerful tool in gaining the intended reaction from your targeted audience and choosing the right ones to represent your brand is vital to success. Good use of colour can direct your visitor’s emotions the way you want, make them respond to your call-to-actions, and generally increase user engagement on your site.

A colour scheme can force users to make a subconscious judgement about your site and company, so it’s important to get this right and make sure your design and colour align with your brand’s philosophy. Colour helps the mind to process and store images, so getting this right will increase brand recognition and make sure you stay in your user’s memory.

As well as needing a consistent design across your site in terms of layout, fonts and styles, you need a consistent colour palette too. If you have a different design and different colours across the various pages of your site, you risk looking unprofessional and untidy. People don’t trust poorly designed websites and web pages.

Web users have short attention spans, so if they come onto your site and it looks shabby or inconsistent, they won’t trust you. Having an attractive and tasteful web design is going to make you look more professional, and make it look to your visitor like you really know what you’re doing.

Getting Users to Stick Around

Did you know? Given 15 minutes to consume a piece of content, 66% of your audience would rather experience something beautifully designed rather than something plain and simple. Which is part of the reason your web design is so important to your online marketing presence.

The fact is, your visitors will judge your business within seconds. The moment they land on your website is the moment they get their first impression of your business. It’s in these first moments that your web design has an opportunity to make a positive impact on a potential customer.

Good web design does a lot. A sophisticated and professional website builds trust, enhances brand recognition, boosts your messaging, and pushes a visitor closer to conversion. Furthermore, there’s little better at deterring visitors than an ugly and outdated website.

Want people stay on your site and engage with you instead of turning to a competitor? You’re in luck. Our exceptional web design will improve brand perception and generate you leads.

Why You Should Work With Embryo

We are a successful full-service digital marketing agency based in Manchester specialising in lead generation, web design and developmentSEOsocial media and content marketing. We determine how best to meet your requirements, integrating the superb talent within our agency to design websites that are out of the ordinary. Each new project allows us to show how original our work is, and how beneficial it can be for your brand. No task is too big. No goal is out of reach. It’s no wonder our clients always want more.

If your website has been lacking in leads, or you’re wondering how to make it more user-friendly and functional, then let’s make it worth the visit.

Web Design Questions Answered:

  • What is responsive web design?

    Responsive design is making sure that your website ‘responds’ to the size of the screen that it is being viewed on so that it still looks great when viewed on any device of any size. Desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones now come in so many different dimensions that it is impossible to just create a rigid design for certain specific screen sizes. Instead, we create websites using flexible layouts, flexible images, and CSS (cascading style sheet) which means that, whatever the screen size, the website fits that space perfectly and gives the website users a great user experience.

  • What makes a great website?

    A great website is one that is built with its users in mind. Whatever the purpose of the site, be it for e-commerce, lead generation, data capture, or a combination of these, each site should have its own unique journey to encourage that behaviour. This is a part of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO); encouraging your users to ‘convert’ using clever website design.

    Using the correct imagery and content are also very important to create a great website design. You might have the nicest images in the world but if they alienate your target audience, you might as well give up now. Your content needs to be carefully written to embody your company’s Tone Of Voice (TOV), and your TOV should be decided upon for the people who you are targeting.

    To sum up, a great website blends expertly written content, great quality images, and useful, beautiful functionality to create a site perfect for the target audience.

  • What is a lightbox in web design?

    A lightbox is a pop-up which highlights key information or asks a user to give their details. Generally, a lightbox blocks other content on the page, and the background of the site is dimmed whilst the lightbox is bright. Usually, you have to cross off a lightbox in order to return back to using the rest of the site. You can also use a lightbox when you are showcasing items such as a video or a gallery of images, meaning that the website only loads these large or data-heavy features once the user chooses to activate them.

  • What is a wireframe in reference to web design?

    A wireframe is a very basic mapping out of the key pages of the website, a type of skeleton of the key features of the site. This is usually one of the first steps in a website design process and can be as “low tech” as drawing a sketch on a piece of paper. The person creating the wireframes, usually a UX designer, would draw out the specific features of the key pages on the website and map out where the key features will go.

  • How will we communicate during the web design process?

    We will communicate with our clients regularly, with project updates in weekly calls, emails, and face-to-face meetings. We will fit our communication around you – some of our clients prefer to speak regularly on the phone, some just prefer brief updates via email, and some choose to come into our office for each update.

  • How much does usability play a part in your designs?

    Usability refers to how easy the site is for a user to interact with the site, and this is a cornerstone of our website design process. Some websites might look visually stunning, but be really difficult for users to actually make their way around. Because we are a search-led website design agency, our websites are all built with SEO best practices. Search engines value website usability; it is a ranking factor for how well a website performs. Therefore, we blend aesthetics with usability to create websites that look great but also perform really well.

  • What makes a good web design?

    A good website design is beautiful, useful, and gives the user what they want quickly and easily. It also isn’t ‘style over substance’ – there is no point in having an amazing website if it takes 30 seconds to load and annoys all of your users to the point that they never get to experience it!

  • Can I see the designs when they are in progress?

    You will see the designs at multiple stages. The first design step in our process is to create the home page designs, and then we will present these to you, and you have the opportunity to send over any amendments. Then we will work on any changes to the home page designs as well as create designs for any bespoke internal pages that we are doing for the project. Then we will go through all of these designs together, and once again you will get the opportunity to share any comments or amendments.

    We want to make sure that the website is completely signed off from a design perspective before we start to develop the site, which, although requiring more work upfront, results in far fewer delays later down the line.

  • Are your designs project managed?

    Yes, with Embryo you will have a dedicated, PRINCE2-certified project manager who will manage your project from beginning to end. They will be your constant port of call, they will let you know exactly what assets you need to provide, what access they need, what to expect from the project, and you will have your project updates from them too.

  • Will my website work on all devices?

    Yes, all websites we develop are set to work on all devices and browsers. We do robust testing to ensure that this is the case.

  • Can you design e-commerce websites?

    We can indeed, several in fact. We tend to build e-commerce sites using WooCommerce or Shopify, but our website developers have also worked with Magento and PrestaShop.

  • What assets do you usually need from clients?

    The more assets you can give us, the better. High-resolution versions of your logo and your brand guidelines are essential. Product and lifestyle photography can take a website to the next level, but stock imagery can be used if you don’t have your own images, or your business doesn’t lend itself to having its own images. Then it depends on the site, you might want to display logos of the clients you work with, any accreditation you have, and any reviews you want to display. Your project manager will create a list of all of the assets they need for your site.

  • What content management systems do you use and why?

    We predominantly use WordPress. Why use any other? There is a reason it’s the most popular CMS in the world. It’s open-source, it’s user-friendly, it’s SEO-friendly, it’s developer-friendly, and our clients can use it with ease. You can develop a WordPress site to do just about anything you need it to do.

  • What software(s) do you use to create and build the designs?

    We use Invision, Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch for our designs.

  • How do you keep up with current web design trends and technologies?

    Our web design team looks at websites like Behance, where the best of the best designers & developers showcase their work. If you can keep up with the in design trends on Behance, you are pretty much at the forefront of design trends and technologies. Our website team are big web design geeks, they read a lot of design articles in their spare time, they look at the Awwwards website, Medium, Dribbble, Codrops…There are so many!

  • What do you love most about your job?

    No project is ever the same. No matter what web design project we undertake, the company, their goals, their brand, and their main aspirations for the website, all of them are completely unique. It’s also so creative, being able to make beautiful websites that delight our clients is a great feeling. It’s also very fast-paced and I have never once been bored doing this job.

  • Why should I choose you to design and build my website?

    There are many reasons why our website team are great to work with; we have really talented team members, we go above and beyond for our clients, and our service is second to none. But, more importantly than all of those things in terms of the website you will end up with, we are a search-led website team.

    You might think that all website developers would know how to build a website that ranks well on Google, but you would be wrong. The disciplines of SEO and website development are traditionally two very separate disciplines, which has resulted in us working with some clients who have spent a lot of money getting new websites that look great but would never ever make it onto the first page of Google.

    We’ve seen websites which have actually had Google’s robots blocked from crawling the site – not on purpose but purely because of a lack of awareness. The fact that our website projects are completely integrated with our search team is the #1 reason that you should choose Embryo to design and build your site.

  • What questions do you ask a client when starting a new project?

    In one of our first meetings, we will have to create your design brief together. In this session, we ask a lot of questions about the company, your target audience, your USPs, your brand, why you want a new website, what you want people to think about your brand… There are far too many questions to list here. Our project manager wrote a whole blog about the importance of a website design brief, which you can read here!

  • Can you create a logo for my site?

    Yes, we can, our designers have all got a lot of experience working on company brands, be it a startup with just a company name, from a huge company re-brand. Sometimes, we have to recommend a logo redesign, because an old-fashioned logo can really ruin a beautiful new website.

Ready to start your growth journey?

Please get in touch with our team to find out more about how our creative team can amplify your digital designs.

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"We chose to work with Embryo due to their experience in design and development. The whole process with Embryo was seamless."

Stephen Bullock, The Piece Hall