Prove It: How to Show Results on Your Website

If you’ve been following our series on How to Create and Write a Great Website, then you’ve already read a lot about how to craft your story to connect with your ideal audiences. This week, we’ll talk about how to prove to your potential clients and customers that you’re just what they’ve been looking for.

Prove It: Create Your Website Proof Page

The “Proof" page is one of the most important pages on any website. This is the page where you’ll show potential clients the expected outcome – or results – of your work together. Before moving forward with a decision to purchase, your site visitors want to see evidence that you have a track record of success. They must feel that you have successfully done what they need you to do many times before – and that you can do it for them as well.

Just as with your Services page, you can name this page according to what makes sense for your business. You might call it “Results,” “Our Work,” “Testimonials” or something else that makes it clear this is where your site visitors can find proof of what you’ve done. You can provide this proof in a number of ways:

‍Client List & Logos

‍If you've worked with notable clients, that's an accomplishment to highlight. Use their logos on your website.

‍Numbers/Statistics/Data

‍You may have facts and figures that show the results you get. This is your chance to show them off. For example:

• “More than half of our coaching clients get a raise or promotion within six months of working with us.”
• “We've helped hundreds of small businesses like yours…”
• “More than 300 students have completed our course in the past three years, with 98 percent saying they would recommend it to someone else.”
• “In reviews from 1,000 participants, our workshops have an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5.”

Testimonials

‍For anyone who's thinking about working with you, testimonials are the next best thing to a personal referral and readily convey credibility.When a client provides a testimonial, be sure to give it a quick edit before it goes on your website. A few things to look for:

• Grammatical mistakes and misspellings. Go ahead and clean these up.
• Deviations from the style of the site. For example, a testimonial might refer to your business as "Smith and Jones," but you style your business name as "Smith + Jones."
• Length. Some testimonials include a lot of extraneous information. If a testimonial is longer than a couple of sentences, you can edit out anything that’s not helpful to a potential client. This should be a quick but impactful read. Check out the Testimonials page on the DesignGood website for reference.

Of course, editing shouldn’t change the essence of what someone originally said – they should still recognize their words. For example, let's say the testimonial provider said, "The workshop was phenomenal and the booking process is pretty good." You can't change that to "The workshop and the whole booking process were phenomenal." It's better just to cut the second part of that sentence.

‍Case Studies

‍A case study is a narrative that shows how your business helped a client. It explains the problem the client was facing and how you provided a solution. Not every business needs case studies. A good general rule is, the more expensive your service offerings are, and the more research your prospects tend to do before making a purchase, the more beneficial case studies are to your website.Like all the other content on your site, your case studies should feel on-brand for your business. In other words, if the overall voice of your website is informal and conversational, don't make your case studies sound like college research papers! Case studies are a big project, and if they're right for your business, we recommend working with a professional writer to create them.

‍Portfolio

‍If your work is highly visual, a portfolio might be the best use for your Proof page. The main thing to keep in mind about your portfolio is that the quality of the photography must be awesome. Besides photos of your work, your portfolio needs captions that help site visitors understand what they're seeing. Use a consistent caption format for every project in your portfolio.At DesignGood, the “Our Work” page on our website serves as our portfolio and visual proof of the work we’ve done for clients. While the page doesn’t come close to including every project we’ve ever done, it does include a curated list of our favorite projects and clients. These are the projects we’re most delighted to talk about, that represent our broad range of skills and services, and that highlight the diversity of our clientele. A visitor to our site can get a quick read of our design chops and dive in to each project to see more.

‍Looking for more?

‍Check out these articles to gather more ideas for creating your proof page:

• How to Drive Sales With Better Customer Testimonials (from the DesignGood blog)
• 8 Tips for Creating a Great Case Study
• 4 Secrets to Building a Portfolio That’ll Make Everyone Want to Hire You

‍Questions To Get You Started:

‍Use these prompts to get started gathering the info you need to show your clients how you do what you do so well. If you don’t currently have testimonials, who do you know who would be delighted to provide one for you? Can you mine your Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn profiles for past comments on your work, products, process or character? If your services are largely non-visual, is there another way to visually present proof of your work? Could you include photos of a whiteboard that demonstrate your thinking process? Infographics? A visual representation of your results? If you were a potential customer, what would prove to you that your products or services are the best choice? Can you include that information on your proof page?

‍Check out the other articles in our series to learn how to create and write a great Services, About and Homepage. And keep us in the loop on your progress! We love hearing from – and helping – high-vibe businesses succeed.