A Basic Guide to Web Design for Metal Fabricators

Have you ever heard the phrase, “All roads lead to Rome?” Well, in the world of digital marketing, it’s more like, “All roads lead to your website.” No matter which marketing campaign a prospect discovers you through, the goal is for them to eventually end up on your site — so shouldn’t your website be optimized to keep them around?

That’s why web design for metal fabricators is so important. You want your website to look appealing and run smoothly so that your target audience will be encouraged to stick around long enough to convert. For that, you need to use a variety of web design best practices.

What exactly is web design for metal fabrication companies, though, and what best practices are we referring to? That’s what we’ll cover on this page. Below, we’ll go over the following:

• What is web design for metal fabricators?
• Why should your business use web design?
• 5 tips for using web design for metal fabrication companies

Read on to learn more about each one. And don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter, Revenue Weekly, to get even more digital marketing info sent right to your inbox!

What is web design for metal fabricators?

Web design is a digital marketing strategy that involves optimizing your website to retain traffic. It involves both aesthetic elements (the way your site looks) and functional elements (the way your site runs). Optimizing in both of these areas is necessary to retain more traffic.

Why should your business use web design?

Ultimately, the main goal of web design is to keep users on your site longer. That’s important because if they leave soon after arriving, they won’t have enough time to convert into leads or customers. And that means that all the marketing that brought them there will have been for nothing.

Many web design elements are also important because they contribute to your site’s ranking in search results, which is how many users discover your business in the first place. With poor rankings, though, those discoveries will be few and far between.

Both of those issues are serious for metal fabricators, because your clients often want custom parts from you. That means they’re going to spend a lot of time researching their options before they settle on your business. And that research involves searching on Google and then reading up on your website.

In short, metal fabricator web design helps you earn more clients and bring in more revenue.

5 tips for using web design for metal fabrication companies

Metal fabrication web design is clearly important, but one big question remains: How do you do it? What does it take to optimize your website for better traffic retention and conversions? Well, there are several things you can do, and we’ll go over some of the most important ones below. Some top web design tips include:

1. Ensure that your site is visually appealing
2. Make your site mobile-friendly
3. Optimize your page speeds
4. Use an intuitive navigation setup
5. Make sure your site is secure

Keep reading to find out more about each of those tips!

1. Ensure that your site is visually appealing

The most well-known aspect of web design involves simply making your site look good. Have you ever visited a website that looked hideous or poorly laid-out, and immediately left because you just didn’t want to have to look at that mess? If so, you know you don’t want that to happen on your site.

For metal fabricators, specifically, there are a couple of big elements you’ll want to hit. First of all, you’ll want the design of your site to appear professional. Odds are, most (or all) of your clients are businesses, so you want to show them that you’re professional and competent. Secondly, you’ll probably want to feature some photos of parts you’ve manufactured to show off your work.

Other visual design elements to optimize include:

• Color scheme
• White space
• Font size and typeface
• Alignment
• And more!

2. Make your site mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendliness is another big component of metal fabrication web design. For one thing, a lot of your prospects will probably be visiting your website on a mobile device, and you don’t want to drive them away with poor mobile web design. For another, Google won’t even rank your site if it doesn’t have a mobile version.

As a result, the wisest approach is to use responsive design. That refers to a type of web design that automatically restructures the elements on a page to fit the screen where they appear. As a result, a given page will look slightly different on desktop than on mobile.

Here’s an example of a page on desktop:

And on mobile:

Making your site mobile-friendly will help you draw in and retain a lot more traffic.

3. Optimize your page speeds

It’s not just a lack of mobile-friendliness that will annoy users (and Google). The same thing happens with slow-loading pages. People don’t want to have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load, and if your pages take longer than that, they’ll just leave. For that reason, you should definitely optimize your page speeds.

So, how do you do that? Here are a few methods you can try:

• Limit redirects
• Cache web pages
• Compress images
• Minify code

This is a pretty important one, because page load speed is one of the most impactful ranking factors Google uses. A slow website isn’t going to rank very high or get much traffic.

4. Use an intuitive navigation setup

Metal fabrication clients tend to operate with a sense of immediacy and urgency. If a prospect visits your site, they aren’t there to casually browse around — they need a metal fabricator as soon as they can get one, because the longer they take, the longer their own production process is held up.

That means they aren’t going to waste their time on a site where they can’t find what they need. They want to be able to immediately see the layout of your website so they can navigate to where they want to go. For that reason, ensure that your site features an intuitive navigation layout.

That means you should organize your site in a logical way, and you should present that layout via a navigation bar at the top of the page. Try to put yourself in a user’s shoes and imagine what type of site layout would be the easiest for them to navigate, and then implement that.

5. Make sure your site is secure

In the metal fabrication industry, safety is paramount. Believe it or not, the same thing is true of web design. The difference is that metal fabrication involves physical safety, while web design involves digital safety. To clarify, what we’re talking about is website security.

You definitely want to make sure you’re using a secure website. The best way to do that is to implement HTTPS, which is a more secure version of the standard HTTP protocol. Why do this? Well, for one thing, users can see if your site uses HTTPS. Knowing that it does will make them feel safer visiting it. And more importantly, Google ranks sites higher when they use HTTPS.

This is particularly important if any part of your site requires users to put in personal information, whether it’s their financial info or simply their email address. They’ll feel a lot more comfortable doing that if they have assurance that your site is secure.

To get HTTPS, you’ll need to buy an SSL certificate and install it on your website.

Revitalize your metal fabricator web design with WebFX

The tips listed above were simple enough, but there’s still a lot more that goes into metal fabricator web design. Beyond that, it can be very time-consuming to build (or reoptimize) a whole website. That’s why a lot of metal fabricators choose to bring in a professional web design agency like WebFX.

When you partner with WebFX for our web design services, you’ll be able to harness our more than 28 years of experience with web design to create a site that ranks a lot higher, brings in a lot more traffic, and drives more revenue.

Interested in a partnership? Just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!

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