luxury website

Marketing is getting much harder. So many channels to think about across a range of devices and more and more competition as technology makes it easier to start a new business. Social is powerful, especially if you are in the business of luxury but at the heart of your marketing should be an intelligently thought out bespoke, luxury website design. With so many underhand tactics on social media with people buying followers having 50k followers isn’t enough. One place people will go without fail is your website.

Nothing cries out cheap more than a website that looks and feels like so many websites on the internet. So we have written this article to guide you through what truly makes a website exceptional with a luxury audience in mind.

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When luxury businesses market the finest things money can buy, it tends to mean a lot of people can’t afford it. It creates a sense of exclusivity. To take this a step further and produce something that is a limited edition, the more rare and bespoke it’s likely to be. That's exactly what makes luxury brands special.

Choosing a pre-made theme that you customise is the opposite of what is expected in the luxury market. As you would expect, the more attention to detail and the more bespoke a product is, the more it’s likely to cost. If you are serious about competing in the luxury market, your website really does need to be one of a kind.

Users need to feel a sense of quality and craftsmanship in your language and your visuals to feel confident you pay this much attention to whatever your business offers. Pay little or no attention to your marketing and it doesn’t say much to the standards of your product.

To design any market leading website, you have to design and build your site completely bespoke. Not only from a design perspective to have full control over how it looks, how you interact with it but also the structure. This is especially important if you are looking to be found on Google with a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. After the design, it’s vital it’s designed for speed not only to boost rankings but to ensure users don’t get bored waiting for your page to load which can often be the case on mobile.

Any luxury website wouldn’t be exceptional without a well-considered brand identity. A logo from a logo design agency is one thing to think about. A user can be deterred from your website with one glimpse of your homepage so you need to make an impression from the start. If your identity is lacking, we would strongly recommend that you address this before you design your website. To go even further, if you haven’t spent time on a brand strategy to understand your positioning and audience, stop what you are doing. We can assume you truly understand your strategy for luxury branding and you need to align your main marketing channel to your business objectives. Always ensure your identity is matching what you say and do.

An often overlooked aspect of branding. At the core of your visual identity is the typography so why would you choose a font most business choose. It’s a huge opportunity to differentiate from your competition and why there has been a much bigger trend in recent years for brands to design their own unique typeface. Whatever you do, pay attention to your typography. This goes further than just picking the right font. Letter spacing, line heights, font combinations as well as the width of your paragraphs all have an impact on how you feel when you read those words.

Text too light and it’s hard to read, paragraph too long and the brain will struggle to digest the information. Whoever is designing your website, ensure they understand the impact of typography on the user experience.

Understand how users will move from page to page and how you interlink the user journey to remain seamless. Everybody has been on a website that is difficult to use and has clicked off. Don’t be that website. A big part of how people use your site is to be guided through what you want them to do next so strong calls to action with consistent styling needs to be considered to encourage the desired result of choosing your company.

No luxury business can ever call itself one without using beautiful bespoke imagery. Unique photography and illustration are the key to elevating your business over the competition. Always look for a creatives help when art directing any custom imagery. We have seen too many businesses attempt to take this on with some cringeworthy results. As with our approach to any aspect of our business, if we think it’s out of our scope, we bring in the experience to direct us.

A lot of people create websites based on what others are doing in their space without really understanding what the goal of the website is and why you actually producing certain pages to sit on your site. Maybe you want to drive traffic through paid and social media as you don’t want to invest in SEO. You would then design a website that is completely different to the one that’s main focus is to be found on Google. Different structure, different messaging but definitely the same values.

Regardless of what you create, how you are different and what you stand for need to shine through throughout. It’s why we believe as a boutique luxury branding agency, we have the upper hand over many web design agencies. They might be more technically proficient to add more bells and whistles but if they don’t understand the audience and know how to talk to them, you have wasted a lot of time and money. Our focus in on quality and not quantity. Well written, extremely considered and visually stunning.

As mentioned earlier, there are many different strategies to drive traffic to your website but we think it’s always best to build on owned land. What does that mean? Social channels will come and go and with it your audience may too. Your owned land is your website. You have full control over everything on it which will far outlast the trends of new social media channels. We would always recommend social and paid advertising in the short term but without fail a solid content marketing strategy for long term growth.