Over the years, websites have drastically changed as consumer behavior has changed. Back in the early days, you could put some text on a basic background and keep people engaged simply due to how people used websites and the internet itself.

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Unfortunately those days are long gone and modern websites are much more complex and need to be thought out to keep people engaged.

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With a flooded market and consumer attention spans lower than ever, websites need to be more strategic and polished than ever to make a positive impact for your business.

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Keep reading to learn the seven things your website needs to stand out in the marketplace and help you reach your business goals quickly and efficiently.

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Have A North Star Goal

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The number one most important thing your website needs is a north star goal that is clear to your audience. Why is someone visiting your website? Why are they giving their time to consume the information that you’re presenting?

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Many websites fail because they try to overcomplicate things.

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As you design your customer journey, it’s important to build the flow to guide people to the goal you want them to take.

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Your north star goal needs to include your ideal customer persona and the action you want them to take.

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The Customer Is The Hero

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If you’ve read “Building A Storybrand” by Donald Miller, you’re probably familiar with the concept of making the customer the “hero of the story”.

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All too often, brands are positioning themselves as the hero and focusing on the brand too much.

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Instead, position your product as the one thing that is standing between your customer’s current state and their goal state.

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Your customer is shopping for a solution to their problem and if your product can be the bridge from problem to solution, your customer will be ready to whip out their credit card.

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Design System

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To maintain branding consistency throughout your website, utilizing a style guide and a consistent class naming convention is crucial. 

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One of the most popular design systems is Finsweet’s Client-First system. This is what we use at 253 Media for all of our Webflow builds!

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Design system’s like Client-First create a framework for headings, body text, buttons, spacing, and pretty much every other element structure on your site so you can maintain consistency throughout your site.

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This is important because the second you start to have inconsistencies throughout your site, the entire design will start to feel off and your customers will notice that from a mile away.

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CMS Usage

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Webflow is built around their sophisticated CMS functionality and the best Webflow websites utilize the CMS throughout the site.

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This will give your site the ability to reuse content and again… maintain consistency. 

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This is especially useful for internal teams who need to reference content from different sources without having to reupload or search for specific content.

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Plus, the CMS and the individual CMS pages make it lightning fast to mass-create landing pages for special offers, case studies, gallery pages, and more!

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Powerful Content

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Audience targeted content marketing is perhaps the most impactful conversion that you can make on your website.

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Have you ever wondered why protein companies use extremely fit people for their content? Because people who are buying their products are trying to get fit!

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Using this same concept, you can craft your content for any audience. The goal with content marketing throughout your site is to exploit the problem and draw a blatant difference between where your audience currently is and where they want to be.

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For B2B companies such as startup tech companies, the best content is the content that illustrates how your software will help the business goals.

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For example, if your software saves businesses time, show how you’re streamlining processes or improving automation. The goal for your content should always be to relate your product to your customer’s goal state.

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Bring Your Website To Life

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To put it bluntly, Webflow is the best platform on the market for building highly interactive websites.

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The websites of the olden days were static and had a “dead feeling” to them.

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With Webflow, you can natively bring incredible interactions and animations to your site and you can create custom animations to bring your unique design to life.

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Plus, thanks to your design system that you learned about earlier, you can even assign specific animations to specific elements to create a consistent look and feel to your site.

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Webflow native interaction panel gives you nearly unlimited control of type of interaction, speed, style, motion, fluidity, and more.

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Fully integrated With Your Other Systems

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Now that you have design and development dialed in, the final piece of a great Webflow website is how it integrates with the rest of your business. 

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Using the Webflow API or even tools such as Zapier, you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate your website with your other tools such as your CRM or project management tool.

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Having a high conversion marketing site is great, but if you don’t have it integrated with your other tools to automate your marketing and sales processes, you can end up wasting a lot of time and money.

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With Webflow, you can finally harness the power of a next generation website builder to make the most of your online presence.

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As you build your website, use this as a guide to ensure that you maximize performance and scalability so your website can grow with your business over time.

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