Some agencies try to wow you with visually acrobatic designs that have a similar appeal to a fireworks display. Boom. Bang. Pop. Other agencies talk about transactional lead generation. They seem to think telling your company's story is a simple arithmetic equation. Input content, output sales.
It doesn't work that way. We operate from a simple premise: If your visitors don't trust you, nothing else matters. Trust builds, grows and protects your brand online, turning suspects into prospects and prospects into buyers. We call this approach "trust-centered web design."
A website worthy of your visitors' trust starts with a comprehensive plan. We begin all our website projects by sitting down with you and creating a blueprint that includes gaining a true understanding of your buyers.
Working in batches, our design, content, and development teams will craft the building blocks of your site — wireframes, page mockups, custom modules, templates — and involve you every step of the way.
We believe websites are living, breathing things, so we work with our clients after launch to continually improve their sites. We ensure your site never loses sight of the trust signals necessary to turn visitors into buyers.
Idea Grove recently compiled a list of 68 tips for designing a trust-centered website, and a comprehensive list would be even longer. But some of the core components of trust-centered websites include:
We start the website redesign process with a conversation. We ask about business goals and the role your website is expected to play in meeting those goals. We will learn about your buyers and work with you to fill in the gaps that will help us better understand them. We then take that information and come up with a plan for the kind of site we think can best meet your objectives. Once we’ve decided on the site’s structure and functionality, we turn to the look and feel of the site. This is where we talk about images and colors and fonts. In other words, this is the fun part. But we never shirk on the initial planning. As tempting as it can be to start putting the paint on the walls, we have to get the bones right, and that’s why those first few steps are crucially important to giving you a site that not only sparkles visually, but also helps you meet the business goals you’ve been tasked with achieving.
Yes, you will be able to edit your own website with a little guidance and training. This is because we generally avoid hardcoding sites. That’s not to say there won't be some hardcoded elements, but we aim to build sites using a templates-and-modules approach. That doesn’t mean you’ll get a site that looks like everyone else’s website; you will still get something that reflects you and your brand. But because we believe you should be continually modifying and updating your site, we build it in a way that makes that process as easy as possible. It also means it’s something that you don’t necessarily need us to do. At the end of the project, we want to continue working with you to optimize your site, but we will also give you the keys to your new castle.
Our two senior creatives, Megan Chesterton and Cecil Cross, have more than two decades of combined design experience. Our two content leaders, Jarrett Rush and Les Worley, have more than four decades of experience in technology, marketing and journalism. Together, our creative and content teams create the "words and music" for your website.
In this video, Megan and Jarrett discuss the trust-centered approach to website creation. It will give you a sense of their personalities, philosophy and experience.
As you can see from Idea Grove's own website, our design team prioritizes customer stories, because website visitors trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. That is the heart of our design philosophy.
Specific ways to highlight customer stories on your website include:
Trust badges are emblems on your website intended to instill trust in prospective customers. For e-commerce sites, trust badges are most visible during the checkout process, but many sites today use them on their homepage, product pages and About Us pages as well.
Trust badges provide third-party validation to boost your website conversions. Here are the five main types of trust badges:
Download 72 free trust badges to boost e-commerce trust, designed for you by the Idea Grove creative team.
"As a tech company that serves the restaurant industry, we’ve had to adapt to stay aligned with our customers’ rapidly evolving needs. This includes how we market to them. We turned to Idea Grove to help us reassess and build our brand from the ground up, starting with messaging and branding work. Idea Grove then beautifully brought our brand personality and value proposition to life online with a new website. We've leaned on them as an extension of our team, and they've consistently delivered great client service and high-quality work. We look forward to growing our program with them in the year to come."
KRISTIN PETERSON, CHOWLY, INC
