Engaging Website Design For ‘Boring’ Businesses

Updated May 31, 2022

Stand Out From The Crowd

Not every company gets to sell ‘cool’ products. Marketing is much easier when you’re selling the hottest new technology or the most fashionable new pair of sneakers. But what if you’re selling draft excluders or wall cavity insulation? There’s only so much you can do to make it look exciting. But that doesn’t mean that your website has to be 50 Shades of Beige. With engaging website design, you can build a relationship with your customers, regardless of the product.

You Can Put Lipstick on Pig

Before getting into this, obviously, you need to be sensitive to what your product is. If you’re a funeral home, having a little, animated, ghost mascot on each page of your website might not be in particularly good taste. So take whichever of these ideas fit best with your product or service.

• Use Design and Images – Perhaps the simplest thing to do. Make sure you have a good website designer who can create a good looking website. You might sell carpet tiles but your website doesn’t have to look like it was made in 1999. Don’t let the fact that your competition is using ugly websites stop you from making yours look modern.
• Humor – A little joke can go a long way. An example of a website I like is www.theuserisdrunk.com. The owner of the website has realized that user interface analysis is a bit of a dry topic and decided to spice things up a little by doing reviews drunk. This is perhaps an extreme example, but there is nothing wrong with putting some humor into your website text. But be careful because this will fit with all industries. Trust-based services (banking, lawyers, doctors etc) should probably avoid humor.
• Gamification – Gamification in this context would be awarding your website users points for carrying out certain actions, and then giving them a reward. Dropbox.com did this well early on in their development, offering extra storage to users who shared their website. DuoLingo.com is another good example of gamification in practice. The language learning website assigns users points based on lessons learned and gives them streaks for consecutive days usage.
• Have a mascot – This might seem a bit old hat, but having a mascot can help put a friendly face on the most mundane product. And if your mascot is on your website you can even…
• Use Animation – Another way of brightening your website up to use animations. Coupled with having a mascot this can give a real personality to a website. A good example of this is the VPN service TunnelBear.

Engaging Website Design

If you follow any of the above steps you’ll be on your way towards creating an experience for people who visit your website. You want your company to stand out and be memorable, so try and provide your website users with an engaging and emotional journey. Are you struggling with engaging website design? Do you think your customers are getting bored while they browse your site? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit – Top: Mark Jensen
Photo credit – Bottom: Wikipedia