How to Create Best-in-Class Banking Website Designs

We’ve come a long way from the Wells Fargo Wagon. Banking websites have almost completely eliminated the need for well-staffed branches or extra errands. Thanks to functions like online check deposit, bill payment, loan application, and account creation in a secure digital environment, banking fits much more securely into today’s fast-paced, errand-phobic, online lifestyle.

If your bank has an old, clunky website, the urgency to update it has never been more pressing. Customers are being won and lost based on excellent banking web designs. Get on the good side of that ledger by committing to excellence in your banking web design process.

Banking Website Designs: Four Reasons They’re Important

For banks that don’t see the point of investing in a world-class website, it helps to remember why we are doing this. After all, just because technology can do something doesn’t mean we should do it that way. Is a best-in-class banking website really worth it?

Yes. It definitely is, for four critical reasons:

1. Branding

“Branding” is such a buzzword nowadays that it is easy to forget how important it is. Branding existed before the internet, and it will be around if some new tech replaces the internet (though it’s hard to imagine such a tech!).

People think of branding in terms of logos and color palettes, mission statements, and taglines. Those all play a role, but a brand is bigger than that. 

Your brand is whatever people think of when they hear the name of your bank. Do they think of a financial titan? A tight-knit community bank? Personalized customer service and black-tie treatment? Bargain prices on sophisticated banking products? Your brand is your identity in the banking world--not just the color palette, but who your bank is on the world stage.

Your website is a unique branding tool. More so than your social account, reputation accounts, or directory listings, your website can be molded in your image, to reflect and strengthen your brand at every corner. 

Once the visual and contextual markers of your brand have been established on the website, they can be repeated across your social accounts, directory listings, and reputation accounts to create a unified brand message across all of your web assets.

Over and above any functions it might serve (and it can serve many), it is your calling card to the world. Don’t underestimate the power of that! 

2. Foundation for Good SEO

Without a good website, there’s no SEO. And no bank can afford to neglect SEO.

That’s “search engine optimization” for the uninitiated, and it’s one of the most powerful marketing tools ever invented. Why is it so powerful? Because it leverages one of the most powerful informational tools ever invented—the internet search, especially the Google search.

SEO is the process of optimizing a website so that it appears first (or at least, on the first page) of searches relevant to the website’s topic, genre, or content.

A search is relevant if the user is entering keywords that identify them as warm prospects for your business. You don’t want your Toledo-based credit union to come up in searches for “Car Wash Toledo,” but you do want it to pop up in searches for “Credit Union in Toledo OH.”

Content marketing is another important function of SEO for banking institutions. You want your blog articles to appear high on search engine results pages (SERP) when people search questions that your bank is capable of answering—for example, “How much does a business checking account cost?” or “What credit score do I need to get a mortgage?”

SEO and content marketing can be done on satellite assets, like social media pages or third-party publishing platforms. But SEO is much more effective if the target site is a branded website that has been calibrated for the task.

3. Building Customer Relationships

As a bank, as with every business, there are worse reasons to do something than the fact that your customers expect it.

Customers know what kinds of magic the web can work in the banking world. Online bill payments, image-capture check deposits, electronic fund transfers, online credit applications, chat support--these functions are no longer novelties. Few customers will bother with a website that underdelivers on form and function.

If your website is ugly, hard to use, and poor in features, customers will avoid using it and engage less with your brand less frequently.

On the other hand, if your website is beautiful, user-friendly, and feature-rich, users will come back again and again, strengthening their relationship with your brand. Additionally, check out this article we wrote which highlights some of the innovative ways you can leverage technology to dramatically improve the user experience of your customers. 

4. Differentiation from Competition

Differentiation is a fourth reason to create the best website possible. Your branding helps identify what makes you different from competitor banks. If your SEO is better than your competitors, prospective customers will find your bank first. If your website has poor functionality, information, and design, your customers might leave you for competitors. But if it’s great, they might leave competitors for you.

A great website is an enormous competitive advantage. Users view a killer website as a sign of professionalism and corporate strength. If the company cares enough and has the resources to present a superb digital experience, users assume that company can be trusted. This is especially important when the user in question is trusting you with their money.

[bctt tweet="A great website is an enormous competitive advantage. Users view a killer website as a sign of professionalism and corporate strength." username="digitalpart"]

Banking Website Design Step One: Understanding Your Brand

Designing a great website actually doesn’t start with conceptualizing the website. It starts with conceptualizing your bank as a brand. Again, every person and company has a brand—it’s what people think of when they think of your bank’s trade name. It’s what you are known for.

Brands drive web design, not the other way around. Before we begin fleshing out the details of the website, we need to understand your brand. Here’s what we need to look at:

Branding

Again, a brand is more than just a logo, slogan, or color palette. A brand is an identity, and identities have identifiable components. We need to flesh those out before we can start working them into your website.

Elements of your brand to consider include:

• Brand Values. What does your bank’s brand stand for? Integrity? Putting the customer first? Community impact? Start generic (what bank doesn’t value integrity) and then drill down to a set of values that are unique to your bank.
• Brand Purpose. What impact does your brand hope to make? How will your customers, your community, your country, or the world at large be better because of the products or services you bring into the marketplace?
• Brand Future. Where do you see your bank in five years? In ten? In one hundred? In addition to where your brand is now, where is it going?

User Personas

A user persona is an avatar of your ideal customer. The principle behind creating a user persona is simple—no business has a customer base of everyone. There are always some people your bank can help more than others. Identifying those people makes it possible to design a website around what they like. 

A user persona can be designed manually, but software apps exist to design user personas based on data collected from surveys, social media, or pixel audiences.

The user persona might have a first name—“Kevin,” “Shanice”—and include details about the customer avatar like:

• Sex or gender
• Marital and family status
• Age
• Education level
• Occupation
• Income
• Net worth
• Credit profile
• Life goals
• Hobbies and interests

Once you have your customer personas in place, you don’t have to design your website around the nebulous question of “What would our customers like?” Instead, you get to design the site around the more specific question “What would Kevin like?” or “What would Shanice like?”

Design Elements

Now we get to talk about the logos and the color palettes. According to Taylor & Francis, people make first impressions about your website within 50 milliseconds. That’s 0.05 seconds—far too quickly to read any of the content. That means they make their first impression with their eyes. Your website needs to be ready to make a good first impression in that tiny amount of time. 

What logos, layouts, images, color palettes, and fonts will convey the impression you want visitors to get from your brand? Pay special attention to your color palette. Blacks and greys convey power and authority; reds convey passion; green conveys luck and wealth; and so on.

Internal Alignment

Interestingly, the biggest challenge in your banking web design project may not be communicating with prospects or customers—it may be communicating with the internal stakeholders of the bank itself. 

Management, ownership, IT, third-party vendors--all of them may have their own ideas about what the website should look like and how it should function. 

Before a line of code gets written or a single image dragged into place, it’s important to get all internal stakeholders on the same page. Go over everything mentioned above—branding, user personas, design elements. Get input from everyone, build consensus, and hash out any conflicts.

Once everyone is pulling their oar in the same direction, it’s time to get underway!

Great Banking Website Designs Put the User First

It may seem hard to believe, but the user—that is, the client, the customer, the target audience—used to be an afterthought in web design. Websites were more about the technical prowess, artistic flair, and creativity of the web designer. 

When it became clear that everyone would be bananas for the internet for the foreseeable future, a revolution in user-centric design took hold—an ethos of designing websites with the end-user in mind. 

It makes total sense. Ultimately, a bank is like any other company in that it depends on satisfied customers for its revenue and profitability. Providing a user-centric digital experience goes a long way toward creating satisfied customers—leading to more revenue and profit.

Putting the user first requires attention to several checkpoints, including:

Prototyping

We’re used to the idea of prototyping a product, but prototyping a website? Yes, it’s a thing, and it’s a step that should definitely not be skipped.

A website prototype is a mockup of the site as it will appear in its final form. It may be quite simple and limited in function—little better than a PowerPoint presentation. It might include some of the logos, slogans, and color palettes, as well as a few links, but it may also include filler images, “lorem ipsum” (gibberish) content text, and dummy versions of key functions.

[bctt tweet="When it became clear that everyone would be bananas for the internet for the foreseeable future, a revolution in user-centric design took hold—an ethos of designing websites with the end-user in mind. " username="digitalpart"]

The purpose of the prototype is to get hands-on with the website to better understand what assets are needed for the final product—the visuals, the content, the functions. In other words, prototyping helps create a plan and a roadmap that the development team can follow to produce a completed website.

Design Systems

In the branding stage, we discussed the visual elements of your brand. Now it’s time to boil those visual elements down into design systems. Design systems are codified instructions of how to implement the design elements of the brand.

Design systems enable you to unify the visual experience of your brand across all web assets—not just the website, but social media assets, reputation management sites, directory listings, and similar elements. 

Design systems also enable you to hand off web design and maintenance tasks from one designer to another or from a third-party developer to an in-house IT team. By following the design systems, a new handler should be able to maintain and reproduce the visual experience, maintaining the visual unity of your brand across the web. 

UX

What is UX? It stands for “user experience,” and it sits at the heart of a “user-centric design” philosophy. Early in the history of the web, few tested principles existed to determine what made for a pleasant user experience. Not anymore. UX is a thoroughly studied discipline with a few critical guiding principles that you can rely on, including:

• Simplicity. Not overburdening the user with too much information on the first page is critical to creating good UX. As much as possible, try to offer the user only one choice per section, rather than a cluttered cluster of a dozen choices per section.
• Intuitive Design. The user should never be lost. The next step in the user journey should always be obvious and easy to find. 
• Internal Consistency. Actions within the website should produce predictable, rather than surprising, results. 
• External Consistency. Functions within a website should conform to the way most other websites function. Think about how “Control-C” and “Control-V” work to copy/paste, regardless of the app. In the case of web design, this might include using a magnifying glass icon for a search bar, blue underlined text for hyperlinks, and a “hamburger” collapsing menu.

Animation, Video, and Visuals

Because users form an impression of your website in less than a tenth of a second, animation, video, and visuals make a big difference in creating that impression. Consider the quality, unity, and consistency of the visuals as you order or assemble them. 

However, also consider the role the visuals play in the user experience—how these attractive visual assets contribute to your brand purpose and add value to the customer interaction.

How Content Factors Into Your Banking Website Design

Content is critical to banking website design. Written content helps you express your brand purpose, brand values, and your vision for your brand's future. Reading your content should give users a sense of what it will be like to be a customer of your bank.

But content plays a bigger role. As mentioned above, content marketing is a crucial component of SEO. It usually revolves around the bank “blog,” but a blog can be framed more professionally—a newsletter, resource center, or hub of your brand’s thought leadership in the banking world.

However you frame it, content marketing involves publishing content under the banner of your website that answers common user questions. Again, this could be things like:

• “What are mortgage interest rates like right now?”
• “What interest rates do savings accounts pay?”
• “How does a merchant account work?”

Web tools can be used to determine what questions your prospective users are typing into search engines. You can then plan content around that topic—maybe even title the blog with the question itself! This makes it much more likely that your content will appear at the top of SERPs when users Google that question.

So how do you make a content plan? Here are some steps to pay attention to:

Content Audit

A content audit takes stock of what content assets you already have. It may be content from a previous website, entries from your old blog, white papers you may have published, even transcripts of videos you may have made. You may have more boxes checked on a content strategy than you think.

Content Gap Analysis 

Any kind of “gap analysis” is an assessment of where you are versus where you want to be. That’s the “gap.”

In the case of a content strategy, the gap analysis looks at the results of your content audit and determines which boxes are already checked and which ones still need to be checked.

Of course, this means you need a “to-do” list of content assets. Marketing professionals usually build this content wish list by using “question-finder” web tools. These tools allow you to enter a keyword like “checking account,” “credit card,” or “car loan” and see what questions people have entered into searches.

From these questions, you can build a list of content assets that will answer these questions, making it possible for people performing these searches to find your content assets rather than someone else’s, to form a relationship with your brand rather than someone else’s.

Establishing a Style Guide

A style guide is like a design system, but for written content instead of visual content. With a style guide, different writers can approach the task of writing content for your website, and the content will feel unified and consistent with your brand voice.

Consider—two writers might use different forms of emphasis font. One might use bold, the other might use italic. Neither is wrong. But if your blogs or web pages switch between one or the other, the content starts to look like a jumbled mess.

A style guide might include rules for:

• Use of past, present, and future tense
• Rules for punctuation and the spelling of numerals
• Use of bullet points, numbered lists, bold or italic font, and so on
• Formal vs. informal voice
• Use of first-, second-, or third-person pronouns
• Approaches to introductions and conclusions for each piece of content
• Sentence or paragraph length

Calls to Action

Every content strategy must pay close attention to the call-to-action strategy. A call to action (CTA) tells the user the next step to take—preferably a step in the direction to one of two outcomes: 

• Conversion. A conversion CTA prompts a user to become a customer. This is appropriate if a user can become a customer, from end to end, within the website or digital experience, with no human input required. A conversion CTA might encourage the user to apply online for a new account, fill out a loan application, or engage in other important bank-related functions.  
• Lead generation. A lead-generation CTA prompts a user to become a lead. This might be more appropriate if the product or service in question requires human interaction—for example, a qualifying interview or a high-ticket close. A lead-generation CTA may encourage the user to call the bank office, fill out a contact form, take a survey, or interact with chat support—anything that requires them to give your bank their contact info so that they can receive follow-up contact.

Making Banking Website Designs a Reality: Development and Testing

So far, we’ve spent a lot of time conceptualizing a banking website and little time actually building the website. But with all the pieces we have assembled—the prototype, the design systems, the visual assets, the content plan, and the style guide—the wait is over. It’s time to make this banking website a reality!

A good web developer will pay close attention to the following aspects of your banking website development project: 

Technical SEO

SEO depends partially on content, partially on backlinks (that is, links to your website from other sites). But a big part of SEO starts with the coding of your website. 

A site can be designed in certain ways that trigger the AI web crawler programs used by search engines, causing them to assign your site a higher or lower ranking.

Aspects of good technical SEO include:

• Use of SSL. This is the secure language that starts your URL with “https” instead of “http.” SSL sites get ranked higher. 
• Fast site load speed. In addition to frustrating users, web crawlers can tell if your site is slow and will downrank it.
• Easy site navigation. This could be accomplished by interlinking, creating an XML sitemap, or including a robots.txt file in the site metadata.
• Inclusion of structured data. Structured data is metadata in a specific language that indicates to the search engine web crawlers what the site is about.

Mobile Responsive

Few decisions matter more than the decision to make your site mobile-friendly. More than half of all web browsing activity takes place on mobile devices, and mobile-friendliness is another aspect of good technical SEO—web crawlers notice a mobile-friendly site and uprank it.

The mobile user journey is different in many ways from the desktop journey, but desktop sites load slowly on mobile devices and are very hard to use. Expect significantly better user engagement if your mobile digital experience knocks it out of the park. 

Security

Cybercrime costs individuals and companies trillions of dollars per year. Most companies, especially small businesses, never recover from a cyberattack. 

Banks must be especially attentive to data security, because users trust them with their money and their most personal information (home addresses, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, to name some).

Security measures to implement include:

• SSL encryption
• Firewalls
• Antivirus and malware defense
• Multi-factor authentication
• Automatic logout at session timeout
• Browser cookies
• Credential encryption and hashing
• Integration with biometric authenticators like fingerprints, facial recognition, retina scans, and more

User Acceptance Testing

One of the final steps in banking website design—or any website design—is user acceptance testing (UAT). This is the stage where we actually put the website in the hands of prospective users without any coaching and see how they do.

[bctt tweet="With an excellent banking website, financial institutions of any size can turn these technological revolutions into an asset that streamlines operations, enhances their brand, and performs the function that every bank depends on" username="digitalpart"]

If the UX design is well-executed, users should be able to navigate the digital experience without getting lost and without the need for in-person support. It’s an opportunity to remove the guesswork and gather first-hand data as to how users will interact with the site.

The point of UAT is to identify problem areas that can be fixed, popular features that can be enhanced, and bugs that can be eliminated before the site goes live to the whole world. 

Conclusion

Advances in banking technology have changed the way we deposit and withdraw money, apply for loans, and interact with each other financially.

With an excellent banking website, financial institutions of any size can turn these technological revolutions into an asset that streamlines operations, enhances their brand, and performs the function that every bank depends on—foster fruitful, mutually beneficial customer relationships.

 

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