Within this guide, we will outline some of the main benefits of selecting a high-quality brochure- website for your business.

We shall also discuss some of the popular content management systems (CMS) and why a brochure website is the most common type of company website that most businesses use to promote their services.

 

In this article, we shall cover:

• What is a brochure website is?
• Why it’s essential to have a well-designed brochure website that offers a good user experience (UX) to the customer
• The benefits of choosing a brochure-style website
• What is WordPress?
• Why it’s essential to choose a good quality content management system, such as Drupal, WordPress or Joomla
• How can we design a quality brochure website for a few businesses

What exactly is a brochure website?

A brochure website takes its name from how you would present your business’s services on a printed brochure.

Therefore, just as on a printed brochure, you would separate different services and explain what your company can offer for various folds of the paper; this is also the case with a brochure website, yet instead of folds on paper, you have different pages.

Generally speaking, brochure websites use around 7 to 10 pages on average.

Most brochure websites today are designed using a content management system called “WordPress”.

A brochure website can act as a digital shop window to explain and persuade customers why they should choose your business.

However, for those in the know, for example, those who run a digital marketing agency, they will understand why it’s essential to enhance your user experience (UX) as well and also focus on improving your business’s search engine optimisation (SEO) as well by working to lower bounce rates.

There are often hundreds, if not thousands, of brochure websites that your business will be directly competing with; therefore, how will you make your website stand out from the crowd?

Often, going with the cheapest option, that’s offered by a local web designer is not the best choice; you usually have to choose a quality website that is designed using a reliable content management system such as WordPress instead.

 

What type of businesses will choose a brochure website?

Service providers

Many businesses don’t accept online payments via say debit or credit card; therefore, they don’t need an e-commerce website.

Instead, what they need is a brochure website that advertises the services on different pages; therefore, brochure websites are perfect for everything from plumbers to hairdressers through to say a website for a builder.

Most solicitors’ websites, through to architects and then restaurants, therefore use brochure-style websites.

What makes a brochure website well designed?

The human element

There is an intangible element in web design; that is often, a shopper will know instantly, within a matter of seconds of landing on a website, whether they want to stay on a website and browse items or not and leave.

It goes without saying that the website needs to be well-designed and impressive in terms of its overall design. If the website looks dated, like its come straight out of the 1990s, this means it is expected to have a very high “bounce rate” and therefore have a “low dwell time”.

If a website has a high bounce rate, this can damage the business’s search engine optimisation.

Therefore, you need a fast, well-designed website.

 

Responsive and fast

The company’s website needs to be responsive and load quickly. This means that you need the website to snap to the display onto which is loads, whether that’s on an Android or Apple iPhone, it needs to be extremely fast.

Any website that is clunky to use, slow to load, or just difficult to use generally speaking, will have a low dwell time, which means, again, the business’s “organic search engine optimisation” will be negatively impacted.

 

Simple to contact the business

You should have the business’s contact information clearly noted on the website, as well as having many contact boxes, so it becomes super simple for a shopper to contact the business.
Therefore, you need contact boxes embedded on the page, and need to provide NAP (name, address, phone number of the business) information added on the company website.
Often, web designers call these clear calls to action ‘CTAs,’- for example, it could be something as simple as encouraging the shopper to write their phone number on a contact us form, for one of our sales staff to call them back.

 

Distinctive company branding

What you don’t want to do is have a WordPress website or another content management system website, that resembles a design that is too close to one of your direct competitors.

Instead, what you want is a high-quality website that stands out as being different, that is well-designed to looks simply brilliant.

Consider using bold colours, a unique logo, and a web page layout that stands out from your competitors.

Therefore, what you want to do is make your business website look different from the competition, and stand out for having a really good design.

 

Add trust signals

What are trust signals?

Trust signals can refer to qualifications that the company has obtained, or simply highlighting positive customer reviews that customers have left. Also add awards, such as perhaps a food award that the business has obtained for example?

What this does is reassure the customer, therefore they are likely to spend longer on the website because they trust your company.

This can have a positive impact on the businesses’ SEO if the dwell times are longer and the bounce rate is lower.

 

Bespoke websites

You may have noticed earlier that we mentioned you don’t want your website to resemble a competitor’s website.
Sometimes, it’s possible to find many company websites for a group of lawyers for example, that all look similar for example. Instead, what you want is a bespoke design, a well designed bespoke website.

For example, a well-designed WordPress website that looks professional and stands out from competitors by incorporating strong branding and your brand guidelines.

 

Why we would recommend against opting for a single-page website

Its all well and good, obtaining a single-page website, that’s offered at a low price, yet when you hand it over to a good SEO consultant, their advice will often tell you that to optimise a single-page website is complicated and hard work.

The reason is that most businesses need a website optimised for a range of different SEO keywords, which is often impossible to do on a single-page website.

This is why our web design agency recommends against using a single page website design for most of our customers requirements.

It’s far better to ask your local web designer, to design using a WordPress content management system that has multiple pages instead.

This will allow the different services to be displayed on each page and to optimise each distinct service on its separate page.

Keep the website navigation extremely simple.
Over the years, web designers have employed various main menu designs, ranging from floating menus and hamburger menus to minimalist menu layouts.

However, in our view, it is just better to choose a simple main menu design, which is super simple to use.
Just pick something simple, reliable, and well-designed. When you don’t want a minimalist menu, customers struggle to use it, which increases the website’s bounce rate exponentially.

 

What would you say are the main benefits of a brochure website?

Simple and inexpensive

A well-designed website can often be designed for example, often as little as £1000, you can have a well-designed brochure website constructed in a short period of time.

This means that for most small businesses, they are relatively inexpensive and a great way to promote your business locally within the Cardiff area.

 

Search engine optimisation

A great way to promote businesses to invest in quality search engine optimisation.

 

An FAQ on brochure-style websites:

How long does it typically take to build a brochure website?

This depends on the complexity of the design and the number of pages designed by your website designer.

For a seven-page website, this can often be completed in under three weeks by most large digital marketing agencies.

How much does a brochure website cost to build?

Brochure websites can range significantly in terms of cost, typically costing anywhere between £1,000 and £10,000, depending on the number of pages that need to be designed and the complexity of the design.

In your opinion, what’s the best content management system to choose?

In our opinion, the best content management system to choose is WordPress.
WordPress is a high-quality content management system that is widely used by most businesses; roughly speaking, around 40% of websites are built using this type of CMS.

 

How much should monthly hosting costs be?

Hosting costs vary significantly depending on the speed and quality of the website hosting.

We would recommend paying for good-quality website hosting, and most companies charge about £40 per month for this service if you were to use the website designers to manage your web hosting.

 

How much does a domain renewal cost?

Domain name renewal costs depend on the domain name itself; some can be renewed for as little as £10 per year, while others can cost significantly more, exceeding £10,000 per year depending on the domain name that you choose.

Does your business need a brand-new website designed?

We can design a well-designed website for your business starting from just £ 1,000.