Why does a business owner need a website at all? Maybe to increase trust in a company, showcase a brand, increase a presence in the network ... There are many goals, but in general it all boils down to attracting new customers, maintaining communication with loyal users, and ensuring sales growth.
In this post, we'll talk about what a good front-end is and how a competent approach to its development can help grow your business.
Why does a business need a good front-end?
Successful business development requires a functional, fast and neat website that engages customers and maintains their interest. When creating a website design and layout, it is necessary to consider the business purpose, branding and customer needs, which must be consistent with the company's mission.
The front end of a site is what your users see and can interact with. Whereas in the past the functions of creating the frontend were assigned mainly to web designers, nowadays business owners are increasingly able to manage the interface on their websites.
Why is frontend important for business? Quite simply: It takes the average user less than a second to form an opinion about a company by viewing its website. This impression is almost impossible to change in the future. So the development of the front-end of the website is crucial because the front-end is instantly visible to the user and all its flaws are immediately evident.
What should be the main focus?
Website loading speed and performance are considered the most important characteristics
In recent years, users have become accustomed to page loading in less than 3 seconds. If the wait drags on, visitors start looking for alternatives to your site or web application. At the same time, pages with higher loading speed increase visitor engagement, retention, and a further increase in sales. An instant website response boosts your conversion rate. Thus, high performance is one of the advantages that high-quality front-end development provides from a business point of view. In addition, in its Core Web Vitals metrics, Google considers site loading speed as one of the main metrics and ranks the fastest sites higher in the search.
It is important to have simple and straightforward navigation
Intuitive navigation ensures that visitors can easily find what they are looking for on your site. Good navigation includes a structured, clear, well-planned site layout, as well as a memorable design. A smart combination of these elements allows visitors to easily navigate the site. Having won the trust of your visitors in this way, you can count on them to become your customers.
Much depends on the appearance of the site
A website is the most important marketing tool in your arsenal. In addition, according to statistics, more than 90% of visitors form an opinion about the reliability of the company based on the visual attractiveness of the page. The first visit to a company's website creates its image in the same way that the first meeting forms an opinion about a person, which makes the first impression very important.
We can say that a bad frontend often leads to the loss of a client.
The stability of the site will keep your users
Customers who regularly encounter website errors, HTML issues, and other bugs are unlikely to return. When customer confidence is eroded, the company loses money, as well as the opportunity to attract loyal customers who will share the products with friends and family. A well-planned and neat layout, as well as well-organized graphics and videos on the site, will create the right impression of the company, where customers can count on good service and ease of use.
Don't forget about the convenience of your non-tech employees
You can setup a headless CMS so your marketers can edit content. The peculiarity of such CMS is that whatever you publish can be broadcast anywhere in the form of structured data. For example, on any platform or as a post on a social network.
How to create a frontend that will meet all these requirements?
We recommend checking out the Jamstack. This approach concerns not only the front-end but allows you to focus on development on the front-end since it involves a separation between the back-end and the front-end.
How did this approach come about? Once web developers came up with a way to create end-to-end applications based on the languages they already knew (HTML, CSS, JavaScript + all kinds of frameworks) and gave up the tedious work of setting up the server and configuring the database. Jamstack was born that day.
One of the important parts of the Jamstack is static site generators. In most of our projects, we usually use Gatsby. This tool allows you to create lightning-fast websites due to the lack of server-side rendering; generation is static, with HTML pages being generated at build time and cached by the CDN. And recently the fourth version of Gatsby came out. Gatsby is considered a very fast front-end technology for the modern web and provides a wide variety of branding and design options.
This tool is versatile: static sites, dynamic apps, blogs, online shopping, and other types of projects can all be done with Gatsby.
Gatsby leverages all the power of React and the latest technologies to build websites such as GraphQL, React.js, ES6, Webpack, and CSS. It can also be used to build progressive web applications.
Conclusion
As you can see, a quality front-end is extremely important for business success in 2021. By leveraging a modern set of development approaches such as Jamstack, you can leverage your business metrics, attract new customers, and drive sales. Be sure to hire an experienced development team that will implement your requirements accurately and within a reasonable time frame.
The fact is that not every developer is suitable when it comes to organizing user interaction and creating visual effects for a business website. Only an experienced and trustworthy team can implement the best website development strategy.