By the end of this article, it is our aim for you to confidently and accurately make an informed decision on whether investing in a high-end digital experience for your clients is the right investment to move your brand forward.

We will outline the following topics to help you make your informed choice:

Each day, estimates suggest there are around 137,000 new businesses established worldwide. Approximately​ 252,000 new websites are created every single day globally​. This staggering number underscores the intense competition businesses face in the digital space. As the number of businesses and websites continues to grow, standing out and capturing the attention of potential customers becomes increasingly challenging.

Clearly, you can see why investing in a high-end digital brand experience can be a crucial investment to ensure a brands growth. However, your brand must be ready before even considering this investment.

To help your business make the right decision, and, whether you’re currently in a good position to benefit from this type of investment, we’ve put together the following guide.

What a high-end web design and online digital experience is, and, is not?

Let’s start with what a high-end brand experience is not. It’s not about flashy graphics or excessive animations that hinder usability. It avoids cluttered layouts, slow performance, and a lack of clear navigation. Instead, it focuses on delivering value through content and design that resonates emotionally with the target audience, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the brand's message and purpose.

Conversely, a high-end brand experience and web design are aimed at going beyond just aesthetic appeal; they are about creating an intuitive, engaging, and memorable interaction for users. High-end web design is characterised by a seamless user experience, responsive design, fast loading times, and high-quality visuals that reflect the brand's identity and values. It integrates advanced functionalities like personalised content, interactive features, and more. However, it’s more than this. A high-end brand experience is how it can make your potential client feel. This translates into tangible results that have the potential to impressively grow a brand with speed.

Investing in a high-end digital presence means prioritising user-centric design principles, ensuring accessibility, and continuously optimising based on user feedback and data analytics. This strategic approach positions a brand to not only attract but retain and convert visitors into loyal customers.

What should a high-end web design and digital experience include?
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For this question, let’s delve quickly into how important it is to lay the foundations before contemplating the design. We emphasise this, because on a surface level, a design may seemingly include all of the necessary items you would expect from a high-end online experience, however, without the quality or substance actually needed to form the required results needed for the brand.

Creating a high-end digital experience for your clients should always start with your brand and how you’re marketing to your clients. There should be a well-thought-out strategic approach in how the online experience is formulated. Every great digital agency knows that this starts with getting to know your brand, and, your client demographics, front to back. This is before contemplating the structure, format, content, and design of your website.

A high-end digital brand experience should include various steps to reach final optimal results for the brand. Again, we draw emphasis to these steps, because these are fundamentally essential for the success of the site, and are often overlooked by both agency and client. These are, or at least should be, part of what is included in your finalised high-end web design product.

Step 1 - Wire-framing
This is a crucial step in helping to formulate the structure, page hierarchy and content of your website. Normally achieved on a design platform such as Figma, and is a very basic ‘wire-frame’ of what your website should look like. We’ve included an example below to help you understand the concept. This stage should not be skipped. It allows designers and their clients to experiment with content, section and element sizes, placement, structure, and hierarchy of your site. Getting this right before moving on to the next design stage is essential to how well your final website performs.

Your site should almost tell a story from top to bottom about your product, services, and brand. Each section and element should form a logical, engaging design order, and, online experience for your clients.

Step 2 - Design
Again a fundamental step in the design and build creative process.

This is always done before looking to build out your brands online digital experience. Why? This step allows designers to test out design concepts with the brand. Your web designer may want to give you some example websites for ideas and inspiration for your own design. However, these examples should only be just that, inspiration. Your design should be unique to your brand to help distinguish your business from the rest of the market.

In this stage, designers will spend time brainstorming, getting creative, researching design possibilities and angles, drawing their own inspiration from other sites and design concepts. Your designer should have the experience and ability to find a creative design that best accentuates your brand, its ethos, and, personality. The design should aim to bring your brand to life and appeal to your client's emotional side as well as educate and inform.

At this stage in the process, typography, imagery, colour, overall look and feel of your brands online experience, should all be discussed and concluded. That said, every good designer knows this can be changed/fine-tuned at any stage in the process if the design doesn’t quite feel right.

Step 3 - Build
Most designers may feel this is the last stage in their job. However, you will see from the step below, we feel further steps are needed to form a complete high-end web-design and user experience for their clients.

This is the build stage of the process, where your designer will build out from your original wireframe and designs. Think of it as Blueprint > Design > Erect/build. There are multiple design tools that can be used for this stage in the process. However, we find that using anything less than market leader Webflow for this stage does an injustice to all the hard work and creative process up until now. We won’t go into detail (see our other article on the power behind Webflow for growing unique brands) about Webflow’s capabilities in this particular article. However, Webflow has the ability to bring designs to life. It creates a truly unique immersive brand experience, we feel, cannot be matched by any other platform. Movement around the page to engage and help your audience focus on important aspects of your site, allowing the page to flow seamlessly and effortlessly. As well as, a platform allowing for the ultimate in creativity from a designers perspective.

This is where your online digital experience for your clients can truly be defined and entirely memorable for your audience.

Step 4 - Analyse
A lot of design agencies may leave this step as a choice from their clients, or, leave it out entirely. Personally, we feel this is another essential step in the process in achieving optimal results. This is why we automatically include this as part of our own design process.

We simply need to analyse in order to obtain feedback from our work. We cannnot expect to have every aspect of the web design as complete perfection first time round. The website is formed through extensive research into the brand, as well as, expertise in branding and marketing to formulate the finished design. The online experience should be fairly accurate in capturing your audience and potential client's attention, and therefore optimal results. It should educate, inform, and persuade, of course. However, until we gain feedback from your potential clients we can’t know for certain how the entire site will perform. Undoubtedly there may be a few sticking points in the final online product. This is where analytical information helps us unravel these. We use independent analytical tools as well as Hotjar to capture your client's movement around the page. Whether it’s imagery, copy, structure etc, we can fine-tune based on the site's performance. Statistics don’t lie. The objective of a high-end site is ultimately to increase a brand's top line and move it forward significantly. This can be measured by the brands increased sales, leads and conversions. Engagement can also be measured through how much time is spent on the page, even down to each section.

You can see how this stacks up. But hopefully, this gives you a broad understanding of what you can expect to be included in your high-end digital experience.


What can it do for my brand?
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Let’s start with the less tangible but equally fundamental to a brand's overall growth.

A high-end digital experience should have the ability to uniquely distinguish a brand from its market. It should be able to create a memorable experience for your clients, leaving a positive lasting impression on your brand. It should give a much higher perceived value of your business. One that screams trust, professionalism, and, market leaders. A truly one-of-a-kind digital experience should capture the essence of your brand, leaving your potential clients feeling an emotional attachment towards your company. One they feel could easily lead to future business with your brand.

If we take Apple for example. Part of the buying experience and pleasure towards purchasing from such a leading brand is the online experience when researching and finally purchasing the right product. Their site creates buying tension as well as excites their customers. It cleverly informs whilst opening their minds and imagination to the possibilities, and, benefits, such products could create for them. Apple know that great products, marketing, branding, starts, and ends with a great online brand experience.

An incredible high-end online experience for your brand should encapsulate everything your brand stands for, and, has to offer a client.
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What sort of results can I expect from my investment?
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Let’s move on to the more tangible and measurable business results that can result from the benefits highlighted above.

Your brand can expect higher consumer engagement, the ability to charge premium pricing and attract premium clients. Providing the pre-requisites before purchasing a high-end website have been followed (as highlighted above), you should find that conversions, leads, sales, or all of the above, rise significantly from the same volume of traffic previously flowing to your site. If the digital brand experience has been orchestrated well, you should see a significant increase in ROAS from any marketing campaigns.

Ultimately, you should see big improvements in your companies top-line and growth as a result from your investment.

This can, however, get a little blurred. For example, if the product or service is not desirable, or possibly not marketed well to the right audience, a high-end online experience, no matter how great, cannot change this. The website is an end product designed to significantly increase the effects of what the brand is, does, and, offers. Think of it as the amplifier to everything else your brand does. There can be no chinks in the chain prior to your newly invested online experience for your clients.

Checklist - Is your brand ready to invest in a high-end digital brand experience for your clients?
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Let’s now delve into what we designers need from your brand before considering such an investment.

Product and/or service quality and desirability?
Although obvious, this is often the last thing brands will look at, and for good reason. It is often the most difficult to come to terms with, and/or, change. Your product or service should give genuine value to the consumer. However, if the business service or product is already getting negative feedback or slow sales due to poor performance, no high-end online experience can correct this.

Brand attention/engagement
Is your brand able to engage with its clients? Has your brand already seen interest/leads/sales for your product or service? This can be measured through social media or previous website feedback.

Although investing in a high-end online experience for your clients can create a buzz and engagement from you clients, it is worth considering to create some form of interest around your product or service before investing.

Normally for young business start-ups to obtain funding and interest from investors, these investors need to see a steady stream of sales and interest in the product/service. The same could be said before investing heavily in a premium web design for your business. Some refer to this as the hockey shaped graph. Signifying your businesses growth potential.

If you’re looking to heavily invest in a high-end digital experience for your clients, most likely your sales should already be on the increase. At this point in your brand's growth journey, you may then look to enhance your client's digital experience, and, therefore accelerate your sales and business growth. Again, this is where things can become a little blurred. We have created an online digital experience many times for struggling brands. This has resulted in a turnaround of interest and sales in the brand. So, although we are not completely against investing before your brand's proven growth, we do highly recommend looking to enhance your brand's online client experience once steady growth has been accomplished. From there the opportunities that come from investing in a high-end web design can be vast.

Volume of traffic
There have been exceptions to this rule. However, on the whole, we’d expect a steady volume of traffic to your existing site. The exceptions are; you already have a large online following to promote your product or service, you have enough research to suggest that user engagement in said product or service is extremely high, you already have a waiting list for the product or service, you have vast amounts of experience in starting a successful brand, you know this industry well and are confident sales are there.

Established brand or service
This is not to say young brands should definitely not invest in this service earlier in their brand journey. On occasion’s, if you have an abundance of funds, or equally, are confident the new brand/idea will take off, we do not oppose this. However, most businesses who consider this type of investment are brands already on the rise. They have tried and tested their product and/or service and know there is a strong market for it.
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Does your business actually require high-end design for the products and services you offer?
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What do we mean by this? Although we feel almost every brand out there can benefit massively from creating an incredible online presence, occasionally certain types of brand, or industries, may not require any type of high end design. Trades for example, such as plumbers electricians etc, have a tendency to need to distinguish themselves less than other industries. They rely more heavily on experience, reviews word of mouth etc. The website and online experience is merely a tool to capture business on a very basic form. As long as the experience is professional and efficient a standard design is more than adequate.

We would only recommend this type of investment to brands that place a high emphasis on distinguishing themselves from the rest of their market. Brands that need to clearly portray the essence of who they are, how they would like their consumer to feel toward their brand. Some brands place a very high emphasis on design, feeling, status, how premium they are, and many more. Offering a high-end brand experience can often be used by businesses who are already flourishing and want to offer their customers something more. High-end design and creating a unique user experience can also be essential for brands who need to rise above the noise. Brands who want to convey themselves as market leaders. Who possibly have premium products or services they would like to showcase and enhance. Conversely, brands who feel strongly that in order to make the leap from good to great, they need to enhance their online brand image and status.


Conclusion

Creating a powerful online brand experience for your clients can be more than a worthwhile investment. It has many incredible benefits. It can offer clear distinction from other brands in your market, creating a strong brand identity to allow consumers to easily resonate with your brand, achieve a loyal brand following, obtain access to premium clients and pricing, a way to become oversubscribed. It can massively accelerate a brand's growth based solely on the consumer's perceived higher value of your brand. This can be done purely by creating a high-end visual representation of your brand. We’re in a world where image and perceived value matter greatly.

Creating an incredible online experience for your potential clients can have the effect of establishing brands as market leaders. Again, it comes down to how the experience can massively increase a consumer's perceived value of your brand. The online experience can confidently and boldly create a brand's very own market space, or, a new micro niche within a saturated market. We’ve helped brands who have spent years jostling for position close to the bottom, quickly rise to the top of their market as we watch them flourish.

The purpose of this article is not to put you off making this investment for your brand. It is meant as a guide. To help you assess and ascertain if this is currently the right investment option for your brand. Make sure you have positioned your brand well before taking the leap. The investment can be an accelerator, even transformative for your brand. When investing ensure either your chosen designer, or, members within your brand, have extensive knowledge in branding and marketing. This is a staple on which to base your new online experience. Without these, incredible design is merely just that, incredible design. The purpose of the investment is to achieve results that will help move your brand forward.

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