Making a Website that Works
Your website is YOU, all digitized and delivered on a two-dimensional platter for all the world to see. This is clearly not something you want to cut corners on. Making your website work for you is relatively simple, if a touch time-consuming. Here are the basics for making a website successful:
1. Make it Pretty and Functional:
Appearance does matter, but your design can't go only skin deep. You need to use design techniques that put the most important information right where people's eyes are most likely to wander and that then guides your viewer's gaze toward other important content. A lot of research has been done about this, and you may be surprised by the findings. To learn more about eyetracking in web design, read this ConversionXL article and this Kissmetrics blog post.
Your website must also be an obvious extension of your brand. In fact, it could very easily become the heart and soul of your brand if your business is deeply digital (meaning it has more of a presence online than in the physical realm). To learn more about branding effectively, read our article about Branding Like a Boss.
2. Update Often:
One of the saddest things for us designers is when a beautiful website fades into obscurity because there's nothing to draw viewers to it. This is sad because our creations aren't appreciated, sure, but it's also sad because you, our clients, are missing out on a massive opportunity to cultivate commerce. Google and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vendors love websites that are visited often, bringing the same viewers back again and again whilst also drawing in new viewers, and retaining viewers for more than a few seconds (they call this conversion). You can create this scenario by filling your site with great information (SPEAK YOUR GEEK) and updating that information regularly. Read more about being SEO savvy below.
Also, be sure to share your content on social media to drive more visitors to your site. After all the work you do to get the content up there, it's silly not to share. Finding great content to fill up your site can be tricky, so check out these articles for ideas that might help:
3. Don't be Static:
The world is mobile now, which means your content is going to be viewed on all different kinds and sizes of devices. The age of static websites is over. You need a website that will reshape itself to fit to any device and still look gorgeous. Those websites are called "Dynamic," and being dynamic is dynamite!
There are loads of DIY website creation companies out there that offer dynamic websites as a default. Squarespace and Wix are two of the most popular right now. Wordpress offers dynamic websites, but not all of their themes are dynamic, so you have to be careful to choose those that are, and you'll probably need to know at least a little code to make them work correctly. If you don't want to deal with making your own website, by all means, contact us. We're more than happy to do it for you!
4. Be SEO Savvy:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) done right can make or break your success in the digital realm. You want your site to be one of the first results to come up when people search the web for anything having to do with you, and the only way to do that is to play the algorithm game. Companies like Google and Bing have created algorithms based on specific internet behavior and activity and those algorithms drive who shows up in the search results on their sites.
Back in the day, SEO was all about keywords and meta tags, and that is still a big part of it. But these days supplying great content, or becoming the go-to source for great information, is a much bigger driver of success in the algorithms game.
The SEO world is both simple and complex and explaining it would take many, many pages, but there are some great resources out there that will help you wrap your mind around it all. Start with these websites to give yourself a nice foundation, and you'll soon be super SEO savvy yourself:
Don't know how to design a website? Don't you worry. We've got that all figured out for you. Contact us now for a consultation.