You want a kick-ass website don’t you? Of course you do, so check out our top tips!
1. Great design
You only have about 6 seconds to capture a visitor’s interest before they either stay on your site and look around, or head back to the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and choose one of your competitors.A well designed website with good use of white space, great imagery and individual design elements is essential to keep visitors from leaving your website. If you get this right, your website will have the Trust Factor’, which is essential if you want people to know that your business is credible enough to fill in your contact form, pick up the phone or give you their credit card details.
2. Speed is of the essence
Your web pages need to load as quickly as possible (remember that 6 seconds). Nothing turns a user off more than a slow website, there is just no excuse. Optimising all of your images, minifying your CSS and leveraging browser caching go a long way to turbo boosting your website. You can use tools like Google Page Speed Insights to help you see your website’s bottle necks.
3. Responsive
Over 70% of all web pages viewed online are done so on a mobile device. When you consider that 94% of mobile users will navigate away from a non-mobile friendly website, ignoring mobile users is a big no-no. As if that wasn’t enough, Google has been using mobile friendliness as a ranking factor since 21st of April 2015. If you don’t have a responsive website, you need to get one and fast.
4. UXUI
UX stands for User Experience Design and UI stands for User Interface Design. The user journey of your website is such an important element in web design and if done well can make the difference between getting a new customer or losing one. A great deal needs to go into the structure of your website as a whole and the layout of its individual pages with regards to content and sales messaging. If you get this right, your site will be more intuitive to the user and its content will be easy to find and absorb.
5. Great content
In the modern world of web design, content is king. Your web pages need to contain well-crafted, unique content that is designed to both engage the user and be optimised for search. Establish a tone for your website that speaks to your target demographic in the right voice. Once you have this tone, you need to make sure it is consistent across all pages. Your content needs to contain all of your sales messages too and don’t ignore grammar and punctuation either.
People buy from people so make sure that your website gets the personality of your business across. A great place to do this is on your blog, which can be far less formal than the brochure pages of your website. Another great way to do this is to showcase your staff and team members on the about us section of your site, giving a face to the name.
6. Calls to Action
An often overlooked element in both web design and UXUI are Calls to Action or CTAs. A CTA, as the name suggests, is an element in your site’s content or design that is there to entice a user to interact with it. CTAs can take many forms like, buy now buttons, more info links and contact us today. Every sales page on your site needs at least one call to action and you should think about the journey that you want to take the user on from landing to buying and set your CTAs accordingly.
7. Use web video
Sites with web video have an 86% higher conversion rate than those without. Creating a video is a cost effective, straightforward and easy way to get a complicated idea heard and understood. Connect with web visitors in a way that no other media can and give them a taste of what your business is all about.
8. Make it easy to contact you
You need to make sure that once you have convicted a visitor to do business with you that they can contact you as simply as possible. Have your contact details on every page, as well as easy links to a simple contact form (which you need to test periodically to make sure that its working).
You should also make sure that you respond to enquiries as quickly as possible as web users will not wait for long and are probably contacting multiple suppliers at the same time. Don’t miss out by taking too long to get back to a potential customer.
9. Monitor and improve (CRO)
You need to keep an eye on your website’s performance and make changes to improve conversion over time. I would recommend doing quarterly Conversion Rate Optimisation reviews on your website analysing things like your site traffic. Use tools like Google Analytics to review your top and bottom performing landing pages to see where the traffic is coming from and where it’s going to on your site. Other important metrics are your Bounce Rate and top exit pages. See what you can learn from top performing pages and adjust other pages to improve their performance, then monitor and adjust over time to fine tune your website into peak performance.
10. Be visible in search
Of course all of these points are irrelevant if your website can’t be found in search engines. 97% of all web journeys start with a search engine so you need to make sure that your website and its content are optimised for search. You also need to conduct regular SEO activities on a monthly basis to keep your site fully compliant with the major search engines and continue to improve your keyword performance. If you can’t be found in search then no one will ever visit your kick-ass website!
