How We Do It
Research & Target Market
Developing a final product that engages with your target audience and is tailored to their needs requires a deep understanding of what your user wants. We take the time to find out the information we need to know, which can vary from studying what people are discussing on social platforms to undertaking mystery shopping research.
Geneva are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure we have a profound knowledge of your business, audience and market, prior to anything else. Our in-depth research of your target audience will inform strategic decisions in our planning process. We will create the most suitable website for your target audience, making sure to present information in a clear, obvious and useful manner, in order to help them achieve their goals.
User Experience
Geneva regard user experience as one of the most important aspects of our final products and it is something that we never take for granted. The way in which users feel about your website, in terms of its appearance, usability, content and structure, is crucial in getting them to return and driving more traffic to your business. Our vast amount of research of your audience and market aids us in creating the most suitable website for these people to use.
One way we get these users to return is by consistently producing engaging and persuasive content, otherwise they will look elsewhere. Our basic ethos is that if we make the best possible website, with as good content as possible, then it will make people actually want to come back and link to your website, rather than trying to force them. This approach that we take when creating websites for clients manages to effectively combine strategy, marketing and technology, keeping the user at the heart of everything we do.
Information and Site Architecture
Information and Site Architecture is essentially the blueprint of your website. This part of our solution involves working out and planning the structure, organisation, navigation, labelling and indexing of it, before anything else can be carried out. We always keep in mind your audience’s interests, needs and expectations when we do this as the users are the most important people during the development of any website. Without this architecture, sites tend to wander aimlessly with no clear direction and this can lead to users not finding the information they need, your business losing the conversions you desire, and over time the site will languish.
This is especially the case as your starts to grow and more content and pages are added. Geneva will create a sitemap to avoid this and to establish a navigational procedure which will ensure the smoothest and most straightforward journey around your website, now and in the future. During this process we also pay attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which is at the basis of all our services, as keywords need to be honed in on as part of the URLs and linking structures, to ultimately help drive traffic to your site from day one of going live.
User Task Flows
Making your website as easy to use and navigate as possible is essential. Meticulous planning goes into working out these processes at Geneva and we have decided that the most efficient way of accomplishing it is by using Task Flow diagrams. These are a visual representation of the paths and process your user will face as they communicate with your website. User Task Flows detail the screen flow and the options that are presented to the users as they use the system to complete a task. Geneva produce these for each application process to ensure that the system can be used by a range of people, users can find what they need quickly and easily, and that our online forms are intuitive to use and can be completed in as few steps as possible, which all contributes towards reducing frustration and preventing high dropout rates. The best way of representing a system is by using a structure chart and showing the sequencing of activities.
Our solutions by ordering them from left to right. In order to break down a task, we use a number of questions to represent what the system will do, which must be answered before the next step can be taken. Performing the process in this way will highlight where in the system the options are misunderstood, are carried out differently by different users, or are inconsistent with the higher level task structure.
Wireframes
Wireframing is the first and one of the most important steps in the entire process of your website design. The overall development cannot continue without the client being happy with how these proposals look. It involves using basic wireframe drawings to represent how the final product will look and feel.
They give an indication of the layout of the proposed pages, the navigation system and some of the content. The client and web designers can discuss each part of the wireframe in as much depth as needed and modify certain aspects of the site if they wish, before anything final is decided. Carrying this out before everything else ultimately saves money and time for both parties as much fewer changes will need to be made during the later stages of development, which is quite difficult to do. Deciding how these pages will look requires as much input from you as possible, in order to fully convey what you want for the site. We pride ourselves on our communication with clients and this approach has been very successful during projects and in creating strong business relations so far.
Analytics
Reporting is essential to any business competing in the online world. In order to improve your website and your search engine rankings it is extremely important to learn how your website is being used and who it is being used by.
The in-depth data that Google Analytics offer not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but it also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back. This information can be used and interpreted to help us make continuous changes and improvements to your website, which will lead to better results for your business. Some of the information gathered by Google Analytics includes the specific search terms in which people were navigated to your website. This can help determine which aspects are working and which need improving on the website, in terms of aiding search engine visibility. Among many other things that Google Analytics helps with, we use it to improve the Bounce Rate of your website.
This is the percentage of visits that the user left your site from the landing page or a single-page. This data is used by search engines to gauge the quality of your website so getting a high rate will obviously have a negative impact on your rankings. We determine why a bounce rate is high and work to reduce it, ultimately increasing traffic to your website.