The financing world can confuse people looking for a loan or a line of credit. This makes it crucial for lenders to have a website that simplifies and streamlines the customer journey.
Table of Contents
- Critical Role of Business Websites
- Common Finance Website Design Mistakes
- Key Elements in Finance Website Design
- Final Thoughts
Critical Role of Business Websites
The importance of business websites is underlined by statistics such as:
- More than 80 percent of consumers in the UK conduct transactions online.
- 53 percent planning major purchases research the product online first.
The best business websites are high-performance, round-the-clock sales machines that connect with visitors and turn them into customers.
But building an engaging finance website that converts users into clients can be daunting, with many potential pitfalls.
Common Finance Website Design Mistakes
There are many common mistakes that need to be avoided when building a finance website. These include:
- Poor navigation process.
- There is no optimization for visitors using mobile devices.
- Complex design.
- Poorly written content.
- Weak call-to-action.
Key Elements in Finance Website Design
If you follow key finance website design principles, you’ll have an online platform that delivers outstanding user experience and generates valuable new business by building reputation and brand awareness.
This means careful planning to produce a site that addresses your target audience’s concerns while offering comprehensive solutions. Above all, the site has to make it easy for potential customers to understand their borrowing options.
The web design process should make the site appealing to visitors. This means user-friendly site layout, content, and overall appearance.
The best finance website designs result in more traffic and conversions for the business.
Here are the techniques that are vital when crafting a finance website.
Easy Navigation
Prospective clients will likely leave your finance website if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. So, your site needs to be designed in a way that makes navigating it simple. This means a navigation bar on every page, usually at the top.
A well-organized navigation menu with clearly labelled categories and subcategories will guide visitors through your site with internal links that enable them to get directly to where they need to be.
The navigation bar also allows you to prioritise your content with links to the most important pages on the left of the bar. Depending on the funding services you offer, these links will take visitors to service pages such as bad-credit loans and credit cards.
The navigation bar should also include links to the About Us and Contact Us pages, plus blog and FAQ sections if you have them.
An effective navigation bar taking into account the customer journey is essential to ensure optimal user flow – the way users move through your website.
Mobile Optimisation
Good finance website design takes into account how potential clients use technology to shop around for a loan or credit card. With the rise of smartphones, that means your site must be mobile responsive.
Visitors accessing your site with a smartphone will then experience a user-friendly platform. And so will desktop, laptop, and tablet users.
The website will adapt according to the device to create the best scanning, browsing, reading, and interactive experience.
According to Google, the most popular site engine in the world, a mobile-responsive site meets the following criteria:
- Uses software commonly found on phones (which rules out Adobe Flash Player).
- Has text you can read without zooming in.
- Automatically adjusts content so you don’t have to rotate your screen.
- Has links far enough apart so it’s easy to click the one you want.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check whether your site is mobile compatible.
Older sites may not have the coding for mobile compatibility, and you may need to think about an upgrade. This would entail updating the entire site and relaunching it to ensure mobile responsiveness.
Simple Design
Visual appeal plays an important role in finance website design. Often, less is more.
Going overboard with bells and whistles can ruin a site’s functionality, with too much going on – too many images, too much text, multiple pop-ups, countless links and widgets, and excessive animation.
On the other hand, the best finance web design is simple in nature. It reflects the lender’s trustworthiness with a clean design incorporating quality images and unifying colour scheme and typography.
Simple design allows you to draw your web visitors to the most important area of a page – a critical factor when it comes to the call-to-action. (More on this later).
Quality Written Content
Quality written content such as blog articles and guides on a finance website makes it easier for visitors to understand the often-complex world of financing and make informed decisions.
It also reflects your professionalism and strengthens the bond of trust you need to build with customers.
This material needs to be informative, clear, easy to read, and engaging so visitors will keep coming back for more.
Visual aids like charts and infographics can be used to make complex concepts easier to grasp.
Strong Call-to-Action
A call-to-action (CTA) is a prompt, typically a text link or a button, that motivates a website visitor to stay on the site and take a desired action. It clearly tells them what they need to do next.
CTAs on a finance platform perform a crucial role in encouraging visitors to “check my loan eligibility” or “compare loans”.
Cluttered web pages can confuse, overwhelm. and frustrate visitors, and significantly lessen the likelihood of them finding and completing your call-to-action.
Simplifying your web pages increases conversions by focusing visitors’ attention on your call-to-action, using design elements to guide them directly to the CTA.
Final Thoughts
Website design can make or break your site – and your financial services business. A well-crafted finance site not only attracts visitors but connects with them to build trust.
A streamlined platform that makes finance simple creates a better user experience and more business. These sites not only convert better; they also cost less, load faster, and are more mobile friendly.
