A website is a fundamental part of a companies image. It is like a shop window where your visitors can go and see what you have on offer and see what kind of company you are. If you do not put the right kind of effort into your website, you will pay the consequence in a high bounce rate – when someone takes one look at your site and clicks off – and fewer sales than perhaps your products deserve. A good website is succinct, full of relevant content, and entices a visitor to look at other pages. It is also very discoverable on search engines. A good website takes a lot of effort but get it right, and it pays for itself.
Your Brand
Before you start getting down to the hard work of designing or redesigning an existing website, you need to have a strong brand. A strong brand will mean you have a logo and color theme already created. Moreover, a strong brand is a philosophy of our company. It is your personality, your core values, ethics, ethos, company culture, and everything in between. In essence, it is the foundation to how you are going to promote yourself and create your content. Your brand means that you have a coherent and cohesive theme for all your marketing material, including your website. A brand needs to be recognizable and create that philosophical foundation that all your content can emergy from. Your website can have a dedicated brand narrative page, which can pay dividends if you have spent the time learning about your key customer and their likes and dislikes and adapted your approach to this. A brand is a loaded thing, and you need to create a background before striving forwards without these cohesive things that help build brand loyalty and brand trust.
Plan Your Site
When planning a website, it may be prudent to visualize exactly why someone would be landing there. What are they typing into the search engine? This will help you not only organize the site better, but it will help you when it comes to creating content with relevant keywords. Think about what you need to display to entice someone to stay on your site and hopefully buy your products. You need to ensure that your brand identity is clearly displayed and that your pages are clear and relevant to their search. The main reason someone will be landing on your site needs to be shown on the home page, so they know they have come to the right place. Consider headers, pages, internal links, and ensure the site is as easy to navigate as possible. Do not create too many menu headers as this can be confusing and look unprofessional. Limit it to around seven. Consider the content for each page in terms of the written word, images, videos, are you going to have a blog? You may want to consider if you are going to use a service such as WordPress or Wix to host your site, or you are going to build your own. Host sites have a lot of advantages and generally have online shop plugins you can make use of.
Ensure it is Mobile Friendly
If your site is not mobile-friendly, you will miss out on a lot of potential revenue. Again, platforms such as WordPress are already created with mobile-friendliness in mind. Meaning any site, you create using them will look good on a mobile device. If you want to host your own, but you are struggling with making it mobile-friendly, then why not use an I.T company to help you create it.
Page Speed
You need to make sure that your pages are optimized and are fast-loading. If not, this is another reason for a high bounce rate. If it’s slower than two seconds, you need to investigate the reasons why. You can reduce the amount of content on the page, such as complicated gifs. You could also reduce the image size. You can take away unimportant aspects like plugins too. Think about what the page needs and work outwards from there. Anything superfluous may be slowing it down and distracting your visitors too. It may be an idea to use a monitor web vitals tool that can help you identify slow pages and improve your website.
Relevant Content
When it comes to creating content, especially written content, you need to be aware that less really is more. No one wanted to be wading through oceans of useless text to get to the prevalent piece of information that they need. In fact, most people are unprepared to do this. As far as you can, you need to be succinct, relevant, and to the point in a few words as possible. Remember, simplicity is the aim. Simple language without coming across as patronizing is another skill you may have to develop too. If you already have a website, you may need to go through all the content and rewrite a huge chunk of not all of it to create the desired effect. Remove anything that deters from the point or distracts away from it. Anything overly complicated needs to be rewritten too. This may only leave you with a few lines of useful content, but this is far better than wasting someone’s time. When you write content, remember you need to focus on keywords, keywords is how the search engine will find you, so think about what someone will type into Google and ensure your pages have these words in them. Consider other forms of content, too, such as images, infographics, videos, blogs, vlogs, etc. For example, images need to tell a story and add to the content, not distract or cause any confusion.
When creating content, remember your brand and your philosophy. Use your content to add to this in some way. All this will help you stay consistent when you post on social media too. Your content needs to work together to create a whole and coherent company image.
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