Business owners are always looking for ways to give their businesses a leg up on their competition. The most effective way is to create a web presence that is easy to navigate, informative, and catches the eye. While many factors come into play when designing a website, some best practices can help guide you. Here is a checklist of things you should consider when designing your website.
Have a goal for your website.
So many people have websites, but how many are successful? Far too many people create a website and get frustrated when they don’t immediately get the amount of traffic they want, or enough cash starts pouring in to pay their bills. But if you have that website, then your business is closer to success. It’s just a matter of making sure your website is working for you, not the other way around.
What is the goal of your website? The key to any website is clarity and simplicity in all its elements. Whether it is a blog, a business website, or a personal website, the goal is to attract the right audience, guide them through the site as they read the information, and help them take the desired action. What that action is, depends on the type of site you are building. If you need help, feel free to contact us for a consultation.
Make use of the space on your website.
There is incredible potential on your website for you to make use of the space. It can be the difference between your visitors viewing your website and then going directly to the following site that they see. Please take advantage of the space available, and make sure that you are making the best use of the space. This can be done in several ways, but you need to make sure that you are doing everything possible to make sure that your website is making the best use of the available space.
First off, be sure you don’t just throw “shiny objects” all over your page. Instead, make use of the white space. Don’t feel like every inch of your page should be covered. If you do that, it will be cluttered, and nothing will get across to the viewer. Instead, aim for a clean design.
Next, be sure you have a great flow. You want the user’s eye to never tire of what it is seeing. That is why in most blog posts, you see images that break up the writing. This also works with sales pages! Remember, “a picture is worth 1,000 words.”
Can you find it on Google?
Let’s face it; if your listing isn’t showing on Google or other search engines, then your site isn’t getting the traffic it deserves. That is just a fact. But how do you get it to show? The answer is SEO.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of influencing the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s (like Google) “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page) and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; the site can then convert visitors into customers.
The SEO process consists of all the actions taken to ensure a site appears high in the search engine rankings (i.e., relevant to a sought-after keyword) and that a site’s content will be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines.
Now SEO is a topic that people have written books on, so I won’t explain everything here. But, some things to do and not to do:
- DO use keywords in a natural manner
- DO create a blog
- DO use SEO tools to assist
- DO use proper grammar
- DO NOT stuff keywords unnaturally
- DO NOT rush through the site
- DO NOT forget images
- DO NOT forget alt text on images
If you need assistance with SEO or Website design, feel free to contact us. At the time of writing this article, we have a 75% off deal on some of these services.