Designing a Website
In today’s digital age, a great website is essential to provide your business with a competitive edge, credibility, and recognition, as well as direct access to the market. Good design, optimization, and functionality are what sets a great website apart from websites with a few poorly populated pages. To make the desired impact, your website must not only look great, but it must also provide valuable content to your visitors while pitching your services or products.
Here we share 8 tips that you must follow to design a website that wows visitors from the get-go and generates great leads and sales.
Make Your Site Recognizable
Your best bet would be to choose your company’s name as your website’s domain, making it on-brand and recognizable for prospective visitors. You may also use relevant words that describe your business but remember to not exceed two to three words. Such a domain can help people find you in search results for relevant words. Stay away from long, complicated, or uncommon names or phrases, as they can be hard to remember and can be misspelled.
Make Your Site Memorable
Once you have the users visiting your website, it is important to sustain their interest and leave a positive lasting impression in their minds. Research shows that more than 94% of the first impression of a website is based on its design. Choose website designs that are dynamic and communicate your message visually even before the visitor reads the text. Make use of stock video footage and images. More than 92% of marketers say that websites with videos get more traffic, user time, leads, and sales.
Go for a clean design that consistently sticks to your business’s branding, including colors, fonts, logos, slogans, etc., for a cohesive look both on-screen and off-screen.
Research the type of content your prospective customer would find valuable. Work on audience personas to understand the lifestyle and demographics of your target market. Create content that helps them recognize the problem they face and whose solutions you are offering. Write on different aspects and questions on relevant topics.
Personify Your Business
For fostering a deeper connection with the visitor on your website, they must get to see the people behind the business. In your ‘About’ page, introduce the team members with photos, and share your business’s origin story, values, and mission.
Create a web page on your site to share positive reviews of your services, media features, and testimonials to boost your credibility.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
With an increasing number of users choosing the convenience of a mobile phone over desktops, your website must be mobile-friendly with full optimization for all screen sizes. Dropshipping app Oberlo shares that by May this year, 67.81% of the total web visits in the United States of America were from mobile devices, while 32.19% came from desktops.
Some basic practices to keep in mind for making a mobile-friendly website include the use of clear, large fonts that are legible on smaller screens, clutter-less clean layouts with smooth navigation, and optimized graphics for short loading times.
A website that performs poorly in navigation or scalability on a mobile device not only pits your business lower than its competitors with a mobile-responsive site but also affects the ranking of the website in search engines, leading to less visibility.
Adopt Best ATF Practices for Easy Navigation
Above the Fold (ATF) is the part of the website first visible to a visitor before they scroll down. The content of this section is critically important as it can sustain the interest of the visitor or have them “bounce off” to the competitors.
The best practices here include optimizing the website header that is duplicated across all pages of the site and keeps key elements at the same access point. It must include your business’s logo linked to the homepage as well as the main menu linked to the key sections of the website for smooth navigation. Place your contact information and social media links in this section for the convenience of the visitor.
Check for Accuracy
Your website is part of your customer service, and any errors there can cost you your reputation. Practice periodic checks to ensure all content on your website is sound, both in accuracy as well as correctness of spelling and grammar. This includes contact information, product information, names, dates, and cited facts. Also, keep a check on QR codes, shortened URLs, and links for their validity.
Optimize for Search Engines
It is critically important to refine and optimize your website for search engines so prospective clients and customers can find you. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long-term and cost-effective method to drive organic web traffic to your site.
SEO best practices must be incorporated when developing website content. Make use of SEO tools to discover keywords relevant to your business. Use them in rich and informative posts and pages. They should be incorporated within the content as naturally as possible without seeming forced or irrelevant. Doing so can negatively affect your search engine ranking. Publish new content regularly so the site visits continue.
Optimize your images and videos and enable browser caching to lower the loading time of your site. Ensure the site has updated software and a web host that can handle the required bandwidth.
Your site’s optimization for various screen sizes of desktops, tablets, and mobiles also affects SEO.
Work on getting your business and activities featured in the news and popular blogs so well-reputed sites backlink to your website because this aspect also affects how your site is indexed and ranked in search engines.
Incorporate Calls to Action
The end purpose of a website for your business is to get your visitor to behave in ways that serve your business and make sales. Add calls to action in your content, such as signing up for a first-purchase discount or a membership, purchasing a product or service, downloading the newsletter, getting regular updates via e-mail, sharing your article on their social media accounts, etc.
Add prominent buttons for the CTAs, preferably Above the Fold, so that they are easily spotted. Use language that shows the benefit the visitors get from acting on your call, such as “Stay Ahead in the Style Game with our Weekly Style Tips | Sign Up Now!”, “Members get a free product on every 2nd purchase! Sign Up Here,” and so on.
Conclusion
Regardless of the nature of your business, its presence on the web is essential to provide it credibility and unprecedented access to potential customers. Whether you run your business from home or onsite, design your website as your ideal virtual store that has an impressive reception desk, impeccable customer service, and a knowledgeable and qualified team that answers concerns, suggests best choices, and offers value-added services throughout. We hope these tips help you take the first step toward designing an effective website for your business!
