Whether you work as a travel agent or own a computer store, or any other type of business, having a website to accompany it is more crucial today than ever before. As someone who has worked on a large number of different websites, for all kinds of businesses, I know the ins and outs of a truly engaging and inspiring website.
If you’re currently interested in creating a website for your business, or you’re interested in improving a site you already have, then below you will find 8 key steps that you can and should use to get the most out of your website.
1. Make the Business Description Clear
It’s very important that end users know exactly what you do and who you are the moment they arrive on your website. That way you can avoid any confusion. Make sure your most prominent banners, especially those on your home page, properly and effectively represent the services that your business offers. You also want to ensure any images are accompanied by text that explains a little about the business, what it is and what it does.
You also want an About Us page, which should feature prominently on your footer and header areas of the site. Such pages should be visible and easy to click on, providing more depth into the inner workings of your business.
2. Make Your Site Easily Navigable
When you create a site with an effective navigation system, it makes it much easier for the major search engines to crawl and index your site pages. This also helps to improve the sites user experience (UX). Depending on the size of your website, you may want to go with a flat site structure, which is when every other page is linked from the main page. However, this site structure should be limited to smaller sites, for much larger ones, you’d want to build it out using categories.
Any buttons or menus featured on your site should be easier to identify and to use of course. You should also consider the look and style of the menu.
3. Make Everything Simple
When surfing any website, the experience should be simple and easy. The site should not be cluttered with unnecessary images and links, making it easier for the end user to find what they’re looking for. Make sure white space is effectively used and that your website is easily scan-able. You may also want to go with pop-ups, however, be sure not to overdo it, as they can adversely affect the sites user experience.
Keep in mind that clutter not only makes the site look bad, but also makes it load a lot slower.
4. Inform Your Readers with Engaging Imagery
When it comes to effective website design, you want to strike the right balance between both images and text. When you add imagery to your site, if done correctly, it can make your content more memorable, informative and engaging. There’s a saying that people remember 80% of what they see (or visualise), while remember only 20% of what they’ve read. This should give you a more general idea of where to focus. Processing information via imagery, for most people is much easier – keep that in mind.
When breaking up text using images, think of unique ways of going about it. There are an endless number of ways that you can add images to your site while enhancing the overall design of it.
5. Create Regularly High Quality Content
Search engines value both freshness and quality, for this reason, it’s very important you take the time to publish, only the highest quality articles. You also want to be consistent with it. If you want your site to remain relevant, you want people to recommend your site, then you need to update it with new and relevant articles on a regular basis.
In addition to your typical articles another kind of content that you can and should consider posting to your site are testimonials. To do that, you will need to ask your visitors to write testimonials for your site, then you can publish them to the site. It can and often does provide an excellent avenue to producing high quality content to your site that makes it more appealing to future potential customers.
When writing your content, you should also consider the tone, go with someone more conversational, as this will make it easier and more enjoyable to read.
6. Think about SEO
We’ve already touched on search engine optimisation (SEO), but we’ll touch on it again, given its importance. When it comes to the ranking of your site in the major search engines, you want to consider things like structure of the website, user experience (UX), site responsiveness etc. Other things you should consider are content quality and the speed in which pages load.
The reality is, that it doesn’t matter how nice your site looks if no one can find it in the search engines.
7. Include Socials
It goes without saying that you want a site that’s both great to look at, that features really excellent content. But all of this counts for very little, if you don’t provide users with the opportunity to share the content with others. If you haven’t implemented social buttons and links into your website, then you’re likely losing out on a great deal of traffic.
8. Go with a Compelling CTA
CTAs are basically the elements you put on an ad or somewhere else on your page that encourages or instructs the visitor to carry out a specific action. This call to action could be anything, from subscribing, signing up to a newsletter, joining a trial or clicking to learn more about a service.
Any CTA you feature on your website should stand out. In order to effectively do that, you will need to consider the colour scheme of your CTA, in addition to its background images and exact text used.
You can find many excellent examples of call to actions that should give you a good framework of which to base things on. Consider simplicity, don’t overcrowd it with too many images. Use a good, yet, easy to read typography, you want people to look at your business, website and/or service as both professional and futuristic.
AUTHOR INFO
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.
