How to Create a Website That Works for Your Coworking Business (a Guide)

Need a new website for your flexible workspace and are looking for affordable web design services? In our digital world, an optimized lead-driving website is the most important marketing asset for any business.

Consider this: according to statistics, 81% of consumers research a business or a service before making a purchase decision. And if they don’t see you, it means that your business doesn’t exist and you’ll never have a chance to capture a share on this market.

Modern consumers expect companies to have an online presence and if you don’t have a website, they may think your coworking space is less professional.

 

How Important Is a Website for Your Coworking Business?

Surprisingly, 40% of small businesses don’t have a website. A website is important, but it’s not enough to simply “have” a website. You need one that works for your workspace business. Without that, you’re missing out on a lot of potential business.

• Half of today’s tech-savvy consumers prefer to visit company websites to find branded content and product information.
• 4 of 5 internet users use search engines to find information about local businesses.
• There are more than 3.5 billion Google searches every day. Chances are that someone in your area is searching for a flexible workspace like yours at this very moment.
• 63% of internet users used a website to find local businesses and interact with them.
• 56% of consumers reported that they won’t trust a company without a website. 
• 48% of internet users consider website design the most important indicator of a company’s credibility.

Consumers are more likely to deal with a company they trust. And a web presence communicates trust. The more authoritative your website looks, and the easier it is to use, the more likely prospective customers are to trust you.

 

What Are the Features of a Sales-Driving Design?

If you want to win customers and keep them, your website needs to present a professional image of your coworking space brand. Branding is important for businesses of all sizes because it helps people differentiate between competition.

Although branding is a complex process it applies to web design concept and web design services as well. That’s why you need a powerful and effective web design that will set you apart and make your website memorable.

You need a website for brand building to communicate your unique value proposition and to showcase your authority, values, and culture. To do so, you can also build your well-design professional website with no-code website builders. If you have your heart set on a WordPress site (the world's most popular CMS), but can't code, check out Elementor, a code-free WordPress site builder. Moreover, do some research and find a good web hosting for WordPress for better performance.

 

The Power of Being Mobile Friendly

If you want to gain a competitive edge, your coworking business website needs to be mobile-friendly which means that it should function great on any mobile device.

57% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones and tablets and 91% of mobile users think that mobile access to content is very important.

They may consider leaving a website if they are unable to find what they are looking for and may visit your competitors who provide a better mobile experience. Besides, Google also ranks mobile-friendly websites higher in engine search results.

 

SEO Still Matters

It’s important to make your web design SEO-friendly if you want to improve your website visibility and ranking with search engines and receive a high amount of traffic.

Billions of people use search engines every day but less than 5% of them navigate past the first page of the SERP. It’s critical to deal with web design companies that can integrate SEO strategies into the web design process and optimize your coworking website for the best SEO practices.

 

Stages of Web Design and Development Process

There are two primary approaches that web design companies use for the productive team and customer communication. A traditional approach (often referred to as a Waterfall approach) to web design. Or, a web development process with planning upfront that completes projects in sequential phases.

In the web development process, the designers’ team moves from one phase to another, one at a time. But, your requirements may change as the project goes on. But, there is little space for new ideas or changes.

It’s impossible to make necessary changes in one completed step of the project without disrupting the other one. And it can result in missed deadlines and additional costs.

These days, companies are more reluctant to implement big web design projects without a deep understanding of their chances to succeed. As a response to their needs, the agile approach was created.

It is more dynamic and collaborative and is particularly effective with large, complex, and creative projects. A typical agile project runs in a series of sprints or cycles that include discovery, design, development, and testing.

The agile approach releases the final product to the market faster, requiring only incremental investments. So that, if you need to make changes to the website design, add a feature or a WordPress plugin, with agile approach you can make the improvements since there is space for that.

The agile approach reduces risk by early feedback and testing and makes it possible to change the direction if new opportunities arise during the project. All in all, you can use project tracking software to always keep the track of the projects you are working on.

 

Key Steps in Building a Website

The exact website design and development process may vary slightly in different companies but the basics are the same.

 

1. Discover

The first step is gathering information about your need is to get a clear understanding of the ultimate objectives of the website.

It’s important to learn more about your business, competitors, target market, and customers. You also need to know your business goals, and preferences (in terms of content), functionality, and aesthetics.

 

2. Plan

During this stage, you’ll create an SEO strategy. You’ll also make a sitemap and a wireframe, showing how your website will flow. The sitemap contains a list of topic areas and describes the relationships between them. And a wireframe focuses on the layout and gives a future website a visual structure.

 

3. Design

A designer creates the actual look and feel of the future coworking website. With visual content such as images, photos, videos, colors, logos, the future website starts to take shape.

The designer creates a prototype by combining style and layout and adapting user experience using web design tools. The prototype is tested to ensure that it meets your needs. After that, the designer makes improvements based on your feedback.

This process may take some time depending on the number of cycles needed to give the design a final polished look. If not the designer, you can use post-production services to finalize the look of your design, photos, images, and video content.

 

4. Development

At this stage, the code is written to create the actual website. Typically, the home page is built first and then all the interior pages are added. To get all pages developed well you should hire node.js developers. Another important aspect at this stage is SEO optimization.

 

5. Testing and Launch

The web design and development team checks the entire website – links, forms, and design elements to ensure that everything works well and displays correctly. Then, the site is uploaded to a server and the final check is performed. When your workspace site is launched, it’s time to celebrate.

But keep in mind that your coworking business website is a living thing that must meet the evolving needs of your target audience. When your SEO-optimized website goes live, it is actually just the very beginning of the project and not its end.

Now you have an opportunity to improve the functionality and performance of your website by gathering data about the user behavior, analyzing it, and refining your strategy. You will need to work hard on constant conversion rate optimization (CRO) and on the improvement of user experience.

 

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is the priority for any lead generation strategy. The conversion rate reveals the percentage of your website’s total traffic completing the desired actions. For example, membership purchases, email sign-ups, completing surveys, downloading white papers, creating accounts.

Side note: You can create questionnaires with the help of the best WordPress Survey plugin.

CRO is important because it allows decreasing your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from your website’s visitors. By improving your CRO, you can increase revenue per visitor and grow a successful coworking business. To improve CRO, you need an SSL certificate like RapidSSL certificate, GeoTrust SSL Certificate, or DigiCert SSL certificate. All these SSL certs are from reputed authorities and customers when checking the site status secured, would like to visit the website in the future also.

Wondering how to improve CRO for your website? There are several valuable areas that workspaces need to focus on to transform their visitors into clients:

• Analysis of user behavior
• Gathering customer feedback/conducting online surveys
• Creating content that converts
• Customer segmentation
• Cart abandonment analysis
• A/B and multivariate testing

 

UX Improvement

When we talk about focusing on user experience (UX), we mean having a good understanding of users, their values, needs, limitations, and abilities.

Your users’ needs may change due to a number of factors so you need to often make major changes to your website to improve the user experience.

Keep in mind that poor user experience will eventually result in poor conversion rates, so you should invest your time and money into improving UX as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

What factors influence user experience? You need to create a content-rich and meaningfully designed company website that keeps your visitors engaged.

Your task is to ensure that your website’s users can find value. That means that the information you provide must be:

• Usable – your business website should be easy to use.
• Useful – the content on your site should fulfill the need and be original.
• Accessible to people with disabilities
• Findable – users should be able to easily find your content using search engines and navigate your site
• Credible – your website’s visitors must trust you.
• Desirable – images, brand logos, and other design elements need to appeal to people’s emotions.

 

How to Choose a Web Design Company

If you want to go outsource your coworking space website design, then you need to know how to evaluate companies. For starters, you can check some solutions for outsourcing to Eastern Europe that give the best results for clients.

Follow these five tips to avoid the bad ones out there:

• Do an online search to find web design companies in your area if the location is important to you and make a list of possible web design agencies. Make sure that the company of your choice has a location where you can meet them and discuss your project details.
• Look for a website developmentcompany that has proven experience in creating sites for a variety of industries and has worked both at the local and national levels. Visit their own websites and check out portfolio sections to see examples of their work.
• Ask them about their approach to user experience and make sure they use specific tactics to put UX at the center of their design. Make sure that web designers keep up with the latest design trends such as responsive design, parallax scrolling, etc.
• Look for a company where the team will listen to your ideas and share their own ideas as well.
• Choose a company that also specializes in digital marketing to ensure that your company’s website will deliver the results you want, for example, PWD, a marketing agency that has experts to help you build a well-tailored website for your business.It’s important to create a website around the real needs of your target audience.

 

What’s the End Goal with Web Design Services?

Your website needs to work for your workspace business. Period. Anything short of that, and you need to seriously rethink the structure of your site. The marketplace is too competitive these days. And businesses that see the creation of a website as a box to check off and not as a strategic digital asset won’t succeed.

Building a website that extends your brand presence and lead generation capabilities is absolutely essential. Whether you choose to work on your website in-house or you want to outsource it to a web design company, you should ensure that the final asset promotes your business 24/7, generating leads, providing resources, and supporting customer needs continuously.

The article was written by Kevin Shuler, the CEO of Quandary Consulting Group, a team of tech consultants that specialize in business process management to help businesses scale as they grow.