Creating and maintaining a great website is essential for businesses today. Even if your business has storefronts where you do most of your sales, customers still search the web for all kinds of information before they shop. Some things potential customers are looking for are a sense of trust, quality and expertise. Before they make a trip, before they decide to buy, they are gathering as much information as possible and will check your website and competitors websites to get the information they need. For this reason you need to know, “what makes a good website?” Applying these tips for designing a website will help your business proactively connect with a growing pool of potential customers.
1. Make Your Domain Name Easy to Find
You want your business website to be really easy to find and to remember. This means that if your business name is not available for free, it is worth it to pay for the rights to a domain name that will be easy to find when people are looking for you. Your domain name should be either your exact business name, as close to it as possible or one that completely captures your brand. For example, if you were Nike you would want: Nike.com, Swoosh.com, JustDoIt.com or all of them.
2. Make it Mobile Phone Friendly
The vast majority of searches are instigated on mobile phones and approximately one-third of adult shoppers do all of their online shopping from their phones. Which means that if searchers go to your website and find it difficult to navigate or read on their phones, they will simply move to the next website to get what they need. Additionally, when people have negative experiences on your website with their phones it hurts your Google ranking and makes it harder to be found in the search results.
3. Make Site Navigation User Friendly
A lot of business owners want to know what makes a good website. Most experts will tell you that the most important thing you can do is, make your site super easy to navigate so visitors can quickly find the information they want. Clear headings, short but descriptive paragraphs, quality information, answers to FAQs, easy to find contact information, high resolution images and other user friendly features will help to make each user’s experience on your website simple and rewarding.
4. Create Clean, Purposeful Pages
Have a single purpose for every page on your website. Bunching things together creates confusion and makes it difficult for users to find what they are looking for. Designing attractive and clean pages for different topics, products, services and purposes, with an easy to navigate content bar, will help people find the information they want quickly and easily.
5. Keep It Running Fast
Speed is extremely important with websites! Make sure your website host can maintain bandwidth even during high traffic times, optimize any image and videos on your website to keep download speeds fast. The reason this is so important is because studies have shown that almost 90% of users will leave a site if images and content load too slowly.
6. Maintain Accurate Information
Keeping your website up to date with current information, pricing, images, events, etc., increases the trust level of your visitors. If they can see that your calendar and products and prices are current, they know that you care about their time and your business. These things all take time and effort but they build faith in your brand and your business. Nothing is more important than keeping your contact information up to date so that if potential customers want to communicate with you they will get a quick response.
7. Personalize Your Business Pages
Of all the tips for building a great website this one gets the most specific. You know your business the best. You know your dreams, your vision, what drew you to this business, what you want for your customers. Find ways to communicate these things in a personal way throughout your website. Focus on the little things that make your business unique and personalize those things for your customers.
8. Simplify Your Design
When people ask, “how would you improve a website?” my recommendation frequently is to simplify what they are trying to do with their website. Don’t try to do it all in a few pages. Simply your design so the information is pertinent but succinct. Make sure your logo is visible at the top of every page. Add pages to your website rather than just more information in fewer pages. Keep some white space between paragraphs and on the edges. It helps soothe people and keep them focused and reading. Stick with one or two fonts and a few colors, preferably the same colors as in your logo. Keep it simple.
9. Focus on Your Customer
Remember that the whole reason for your business website is to attract customers. What will interest them? What information will most benefit them? How can you provide them with useful information that is relevant to your business and their potential needs? What features do you like from other websites that would enhance your business website for your customers? If you want to know how to create a user-friendly website for your customers, ask them for their feedback. Provide them with opportunities to give you clear and helpful information during and after their visit to your website.
10. Keep SEO in Mind
Last, but definitely not least, you want your website to work for you! Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of how you would improve a website. Business owner who have made the effort, taken the time, spent the money to follow these tips for building a great website will not only improve your website for your customers but also help to optimize it for the search engine crawlers that are constantly evaluating websites for accuracy, speed and reliability, and then recommending those websites to people who are searching for what your business offers. SEO is a specialized marketing tool that can be learned, but is best done by experienced professionals.
Conclusion
These helpful tips for designing a website are intended to motivate you to do your best to take advantage of the worldwide web to get your business growing. If you are super busy running your business and don’t have the time or staff to devote to all of these steps, then you probably want to know, “how would you improve a website?”
Very simply, I would get help from a full-service marketing agency that specializes in website design, creation, SEO, on how to create a user-friendly website and how to incorporate your brand and business story into that website. This need is especially important and pressing for small to mid-sized businesses who cannot afford their own marketing department but who need the wide expertise and experience that a full service marketing agency like zö agency provides.
zö agency has decades of experience in all aspects of marketing and will work personally with you to create the website you need and the results you want! Contact them at zö.agency today!
