Your website is your business's front door, especially if you rely on providing sales and services through the website, it should be a great one. Having a simple, minimal yet robust, and unique website to differentiate from others is must have to consider in today's' competitive landscape.
What makes a website great?
- Well Designed and Functional
- Easy to use
- Optimized for Any device
- Fresh, High-quality website content
- Easily accessible contact and location information
- Clear calls to action (CTA)
- Optimized for Search Engines and Social Websites
- Improve titles and descriptions to boost CTR (Click-through rate).
- Keep the website structure clutter-free.
- Boost underperforming pages with internal links.
- Optimize content on your site to align with words real people search for.
- Use keywords appropriately in content and links.
Your site reflects your company, your products, your services, and ultimately your brand. Your website design, feel, loading speed, and structure has to play a major role in this. So it’s important to be visually appealing, polished, and professional. A good-looking website helps promote your brand and increase the confidence of your website visitors in your business and to make your business more legitimate.
Let's discuss this with an obvious example, you visit a store that what if it looked messy and pain to the eye, what would be your first impression about it? "This store is probably no good". Even though it is not good to judge a book by its cover, when it comes to your business website especially there are so many things to do the way it looks, how appealing it is.
Let your website breathe, allow white spaces, use uncluttered layouts with quality photographs and graphics look, and let your message shine through.
A great website needs a great logo, a great logo needs a great website.
Your logo, on the other hand, keep it simple, easy to recognize but professional and elegant. If your existing logo does not cooperate with your business get it redesigned in a way it improves your brand identity. To understand what a great logo is, we must first consider its purpose.
If your web designer or developer are experts and know what your audience wants, and if really care about you and the growth of your business they will help you to figure out all of these.
Equally important, the website must function quickly, accurately as expected. Build to web standards, rigorously review and test regularly for speed or functionality. Each page must always be fast and functional because any one of them could be the first or only impression of a potential client. Broken, slow, or poorly constructed areas will leave your visitors frustrated and encourage them to leave.
Your customer's first impression, Well Designed and Functional. Be serious about it!
Visitors to your website are always in a hurry. Don't make them work to get information. User experience (UX) plays a key role in helping visitors use, understand, and stay on your website. Create logical and obvious navigation with a clear hierarchy. Use consistent designs and visual cues for site-wide functionality.
Your site must satisfy both "search engines", who are looking for something specific, and "browsers", which the only search. Help users get things done quickly with site search and keep them engaged by suggesting related content and minimizing dead ends.
Responsive web design simply means creating websites that can adapt to the size of the visitor's viewport. The goal is for content to be rendered differently based on device or screen size so that visitors have an optimal experience no matter how they access a website. The main benefit of responsive web design is that sites load quickly without distortion, so users don't need to manually resize anything to view content.
Today there are no excuses, your site should look great and work well on any platform. The growth of mobile and tablet devices isn't slowing down and you just don't know what your next visitor will use. Optimizing for mobile devices will improve both your visitor experience and your SEO ranking.
Your audience visits your website with specific intentions or goals in mind. During each visit, the quality and value of the content presented can determine whether the visitor stays or leaves.
Be succinct, interesting, and new. Use language that makes sense to your audience—avoid jargon, corporate-speak, and acronyms, which keeps visitors returning and helps SEO strategy. (We will discuss about SEO in detail in another chapter)
Make it easy to engage, offer multiple points of contact: phone, email, social media, and an easy-to-use contact form. A Google map is a bonus. The most important thing is to make sure this information is available on one easy-to-find contact page, or in the footer to be seen on every page of your site.
Your website has a purpose and goals to achieve, one of them is to be connected with visitors. If your site asks nothing of visitors, they will surely do nothing. If we don't ask them or let them ask you anything, what is the purpose of your site? Is that purpose clear to visitors? Even informational sites want visitors to read and share articles, follow the company on social media, download toolkits, join mailing lists, or learn more about the organization. Include one question on each page.
A clear call to action needs to get to the point and be easy to understand. Visitors should never have to think about what to do next. The CTA needs to be prominent on the page.
It’s not enough to build a nice looking website that’s easy to use. It needs to earn traffic. Otherwise, all that effort in design, UX and content development will be for naught. There are plenty of reasons to learn how to optimize for conversions and SEO in tandem.
We will point out several techniques that need to use to optimize and boost SEO, we will discuss this in detail in an upcoming article.
