How can you make sure your website makes the right impression?
You have finally decided you want a new website. But how do you make sure it’s going to gain your customers enthusiasm? How will it make sure that your visitors see your new website and decide you are worth contacting?
Well there are some simple rules to follow that we try to take into consideration whenever we design and build a website for one of our clients and we’re going to take you through the basics of these in this blog.
Remember – User Friendliness
The first and most important point is – make sure people can use it!
If you make your website too confusing, too complicated and too difficult to find your way around then people will get bored, they will get fed up and they will leave. Just a fact of the online world these days!
A major factor to understand here is – who are your website visitors?
If you know what kind of people are going to be visiting your website you can tailor your website’s usability to reflect that. For example; you’re a building supplies business, most of your visitors are going to be… you guessed it… builders! So you don’t need a site that’s got all kinds of clever tricks and sliding elements and so on. It’s also worth remembering that; builders in this example, aren’t likely to be in an office. They’re more likely to be looking at your website on a phone!
Which brings us nicely to our next point….
Make it Mobile Friendly!
An all too common, and for a web designer, unforgivable mistake, is lack of mobile responsiveness on a website.
Nothing looks worse than a site that appears as an itty-bitty version of itself on your phone, meaning you have to endlessly pinch and pull to zoom in and out on the bits you want to look at. These days people don’t have patience when it comes to online browsing, especially when on their phone and their connection is running slow.
They will just leave and try the next site down the list – you’re losing customers that way right now if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website!
Mobile browsing also includes tablets (iPads and the like) so it’s also important to consider them when it comes to your site. Overall mobile browsing now accounts for approximately 52% of all internet usage in the UK and that is only going to rise still further.
Make it Interesting
You’ve been on the site, yes you know the one – “CompanyCo Ltd was founded 30 years ago by Joe Bloggs and has been….” YAWN
That information is ok on your “About Us” page, that someone might want to navigate to gain a sense of who you are. After all, people buy from people! But that being said, you still need to make your site interesting! Have something moving, use pictures, use imagery to draw clicks through to where you want them. Push people to explore your site by making it compelling.
Put information on your site that will draw people in; interesting stories, blogs, news, galleries of recent events, get those on your social media and generate something genuine, personable and engaging that people can get to grips with and want to know more about!
Make Sure People Can Find It
Another basic one, the analogy we like to use is – Would you build a 5-star hotel in the middle of the desert without a road going to it and expect it to be fully booked? Probably not.
The internet is an increasingly busy place, so be sure you take some action to be heard above the noise. Again, people won’t LOOK for you, they’ll stumble upon you by luck – but to quote a sporting maxim – you make your own luck!
Getting your site out there, working on your content, social media, blogging, networking and online marketing you can get your website more and more visitors and (if you’re doing it right) start converting more and more of those into customers!
