If you love burgers, you probably hop off to your nearest McDonald’s or Burger King outlet regularly.
If you can’t resist pizza, Pizza Hut or Domino’s is the place to be.
Addicted to coffee? You probably visit Starbucks at least a week.
McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Starbucks are some of the most popular franchises with global dominance.
People love them.
In fact, they love these franchises so much that they love hopping onto and exploring their website.
If you operate an Idaho-based franchise, then that doesn’t mean your audience won’t visit and explore your website. When they do, they don’t want to see another one of those cluttered and poorly functional websites that they see every day.
Your franchise website design will play a major role in helping you make a good impression. From knocking your branding efforts out of the park to using responsive website design to allowing your customers to look up the nearest outlets, having a great franchise website design is critical.
To help you build a visually appealing and stunning franchise website, we’ve put together this blog post. Here, we’ll be sharing six brilliant web design tips franchises should consider in 2022.
Let’s dive in.
6 Franchise Web Design Tips Businesses Should Consider in 2022
Here’s how franchises can knock their web design efforts out of the park:
- Focus on Brand Consistency
- Give Your Customers the Ability to Find the Nearest Outlet
- Allow Your Customers to Order Online from Your Website
- Provide Your Customers with Exclusive Offers
- Add a Navigation Bar
- Don’t Compromise on the Technical Aspects of Your Website
Focus on Brand Consistency
Remember – you’re not just launching a chain of local restaurants or hair salons or pest control agencies across different locations.
You’re building a brand.
So, it’s really important that your offline branding efforts are consistent with your online ones.
When your customers visit your website, they should feel like they’re visiting your virtual store.
At the same time, you should make sure that your logos and colors are consistent – they should go well with your offline efforts. Even if you make a slight change, your customers may notice.
And it’s not just about the theme of your website.
You should also make sure your website offers a unique experience to your customers that is consistent with your offline experience.
The whole point is – you need to make sure that your website design is consistent with your offline efforts. Some tips you should consider to ensure brand consistency are:
- Focus on your color wheel – You should make sure that the colors you are using on your website are consistent with the colors you’ve implemented across your offline stores or any of your marketing assets.
- Keep your fonts consistent – The fonts you use on your website will also have a major emotional impact. Whenever people see your fonts elsewhere, they’ll remember your brand. So, it’s important to make sure that your fonts are consistent everywhere.
- Similarly, you should laser-focus on other visual elements like logo, photography, and more.
At the end of the day, when your customers hop onto your website, they should feel like they’re visiting your online store.
Give Your Customers the Ability to Find the Nearest Outlet
Let’s say you want to visit the nearest McDonald’s outlet. So, what you can do is head over to McDonald’s Restaurant Locator on their website and add your location (either you can use GPS or add your ZIP code or city and state manually).
Upon entering the Zip Code “83701,” here are the nearest outlets McDonald’s displayed in front of us:
So, it’s a good practice to give your customers the ability to look up your franchise’s nearest outlet. After all, it’s all about providing your customers with the best possible customer experience.
Allow Your Customers to Order Online from Your Website
Note – This section is not applicable to service-based businesses.
If you run a fast-food franchise in Boise, a good franchise web design practice is to allow your customers to order fast food from your website.
If you run a sports franchise in Idaho, you should allow your customers to order shoes or other sports accessories from your website.
Your website should not only help your customers learn more about your franchise but also allow them to explore your products.
We hopped onto Burger King’s website and visited their menu section. From there, we explored our favorite burgers as well as beverages and ordered ourselves some.
And we loveddddd our meal.
However, it’s important to note that:
- Your customers are easily able to order your products using your website.
- The order is redirected to the outlet nearest to your customer.
- There are no payment gateway issues – otherwise, it may result in a frustrating customer experience.
Provide Your Customers with Exclusive Offers
If you want your customers to visit again and again or potential ones to convert, then a good franchise web design practice is to build an “Offers” section – where your customers can avail exclusive offers.
When we visited Burger King’s website, we saw a dedicated “Offers” section – which is the second page we visited, after hopping onto the website. The first one was the landing page itself.
Now, we were asked to add our location – which means different outlets had different offers for their customers.
Some offered a 10% off on all orders above $20, whereas others offered a free burger.
To engage your customers and have a higher probability of converting them, it’s important to give them a good offer – when they order from your website.
Add a Navigation Bar
Want to head over to the About {Your Company} page to know more about a franchise? Or looking forward to ordering and want to visit the “Menu” section?
Whatever action your customers want to take on the website, you should make sure that they’re able to make their way around.
If they want to find the nearest outlet, they should be able to do so without facing any challenges. If they want to order online, they should easily be able to do so. A good franchise web design practice is to add a navigation bar to your website – where you should add the important pages of your website. The rest – non-important pages – can be added to the footer.
The reasons why you should have a navigation bar on your website:
- Will help your customers easily explore your website and not feel lost.
- Will help your customers find your products by product category.
- Will help keep things in order.
But while doing so, make sure that your navigation bar doesn’t look cluttered. It should be simple and sweet yet allow your customers to easily explore important sections of your website.
Don’t Compromise on the Technical Aspects of Your Website
Another important franchise web design tip – don’t just focus on the visual appeal.
Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”
What’s the point of having a visually appealing website if it doesn’t function well?
You can have the most visually appealing website design but what if your visitors are facing a hard time adding products to their cart or finding the nearest location?
At the same time, Google has prioritized user experience and wants websites to deliver their user experience efforts out of the park. Some crucial technical aspects of your website you should focus on are:
- Website Speed
- Website Security
- Ease of Accessibility
- Mobile Compatibility
- Information Structure
- Browser Consistency
- Navigation
- Error Handling
These are the critical factors you should focus on.
That’s Our Secret to a Great Franchise Web Design!
Building a franchise website is different from building a regular company website. You need to take several factors into consideration. And while doing so, you need to ensure brand consistency as well.
At redfox visual, we love helping franchises (local or regional) establish a strong online presence. And we’d love nothing more than to help you out.
Looking forward to hiring a reliable and results-driven franchise web design company?
Not only do we offer premium web design services but we also help businesses establish their presence and grow with our results-driven digital marketing services.
Contact the #1 digital marketing agency in Boise today.
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