In the modern era of business, you must have a good website. I should know when I set up my first business, WriteEasy Ltd, my website was rubbish. This had a knock-on effect as some clients were put off by this and questioned my professional ability. The adage goes that you should think of your company website as your business’s shop window. It should be clean, orderly and appealing. Then you will have people walk into your “shop”. But what makes a great website? In this article, we’ll go into this and some of the ways you can make yours better.
If you’re finding that you don’t have the knowledge or spare time to develop your website, that’s not an issue. The Driven Media Solutions team can help you build a great website. Even if you don’t immediately have the funds needed, you can use our business finance solution. This means that I’d send you a payment link, and you would then be able to spread the cost. This is an excellent option if you’re finding that upfront capital is an issue for you.
High-Level Content Makes a Great Website
One of the first things that makes a great website is your website’s content. For example, if you’re adding photos and images onto your website, you need to make sure they’re great. For instance, before I arranged our corporate headshots for the website, we didn’t have any photos of ourselves. I didn’t want to use the images we had, as they were blurry and not professional enough. That is the kind of approach you need to take with your website’s content. Otherwise, people will leave. This is all a part of making sure your website looks good to the eye.
Additionally, if you’re going to build your SEO presence on your website, you need to make sure that you’re regularly updating. What does periodically updating mean? I suggest that you post content on your blog around 3/4 times a week. I recommend that you optimise these posts for SEO. By regularly posting on your blog, you’ll get 97% more backlinks, and your organic web traffic will significantly increase over time. I should tell you that SEO can take a long time to build. Don’t feel discouraged if you’re not getting any immediate results.
Response Times Make a Great Website
Another aspect that makes a great website is your website’s response times. I shouldn’t need to tell you how important this is. When was the last time you stayed on a website when it took forever to load? Exactly. The statistics show that 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. This is pretty scary stuff because your website takes more than three seconds to load. For instance, if you would get 1,000 visitors, you would lose 400 visitors. If you convert those into missed sales, you’ll be losing a lot of money from a slow website.
Thankfully, there are tools that you can use to identify problems impacting the speed of your site. One such example of one of these tools is PageSpeed Insights by Google. This tool is straightforward. You just put the URL of your location into the tool and run an analysis. It will then flag up all of the different issues on your site that will impact its speed and tell you how to fix these things.
Have a High-Quality Call-To-Action
This seems to be quite an understated aspect of what makes a good website, and I can’t understand why. A call-to-action or CTA is a term in marketing given to something that prompts a visitor to buy or use one of your products or services immediately. A good CTA makes it convenient for the user to purchase and will also trigger the emotional instinct to buy from the customer. A CTA can take the form of a button or form that can be easily used to complete the transaction on your website. If you’re not using a CTA, then you’re likely going to lose out on business.
Some examples of effective CTAs are those that invoke the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in your website visitors. For instance, a clothing brand might implement a CTA for a product offering that they’re running, such as “Buy One Get One Free” or “50% for the next 24-hours. These prompt the customer to act quickly. Otherwise, they will lose access to the offer. You should be transparent and make sure that you’re not running “fake offer”, which would then be rerun immediately after the original one expired. So, do yourself a favour and use the CTA.
Great Design Layouts
When you’re having a website built, one of the first things you should do is make sure that your design layout is excellent. Websites with too much information dumped all over the place are tasteless and hard to look at. This was a much more common theme for earlier websites, although this still crops up from time to time. If you have a poor website layout, you’re ultimately going to lose out on customers and money. If you’re struggling with your design layout, there are several great WordPress themes that you can use.
I wouldn’t recommend using a WordPress theme to get your website designed professionally. This is because, with a web designer, you’d be able to get a more bespoke and original offering. These themes are merely helpful templates. Other web design platforms, such as Wix and Squarespace, also offer website templates. However, I would suggest staying clear of these companies as their websites’ SEO capabilities are pretty poor. Once you have your website layout sorted, you’ll find that people will stay on your site for longer. This makes it more likely for you to get sales from your website.
Effective Colour Palletes
Colour palettes fit in with the previous point of design layout. Despite this, it is significant enough to warrant having its section in this list. When choosing your colour palette, you want to make sure that the colours mesh well together. If you fail to do this, you may find that your site’s colours will crash. This will look terrible, and it will be very off-putting to potential customers, as they will have to shield their eyes rather than reading what’s on your website. That’s something you don’t want, so it’s worth looking in to.
You can help your business in this aspect to identify your company’s primary colours. Do some checks to see if they work well together, and you could even survey responses from people you know. Once you have an idea of what your primary colours will be, you will want to then look into what your secondary and tertiary colours will be. This is because whilst you don’t want an unorganised mix of colours, you also don’t want everything to look the same. Doing this will make your website a lot better.
Easy Navigation
If you genuinely want people to check out every aspect of your website, you need to make sure that navigation is easy. I’ve seen too many examples of websites where I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get to the page I wanted to. I find this to be an instant turn off, and I’ll probably end up going to one of that company’s competitors if their navigation is poor. If they can’t design their website to be easy for users, how can I trust them with my business? You need to be ready for people with this mentality.
One suggestion for easy navigation is to have a transparent menu easily accessible to the page. This menu should lead to all of the other pages on your website unless you have a reason for them to be accessed in a certain way. Another handy thing that is also great for mobile sites has a button that appears whilst the user is scrolling. This button can then be clicked, and it will take the user to the top of the page. Making the user-experience easier is a surefire way to improve your website’s quality.
A Great Web Developer Will Give You a Great Website
As we previously went over, you may not have the technical skills to build your website. I don’t blame you for this. It’s a very particular skill to have. If you’re finding that you can’t handle your website, then I would recommend using a good digital agency to build your website for you. This will ultimately save you a lot of time. The money you spend will be quickly recouped in the business you would get from your website, especially when you compare it to the amount of money you could lose from a poor website.
When you’re looking for a new web designer to help your company grow, you should always try to get some comparative quotes. This is because not all agencies will charge the same amount, and some will provide better value for money than others. Same agencies like Driven Media Solutions will also have ways to make paying easier for you, like our finance option as mentioned above. You want to make sure that you’re finding the best group of people to help your business, so shopping around is always a good idea.
Conclusion
In closing, you should now know the steps you need to take to make a great website. One of the first things you need to consider is the type of content you’re putting on your website and its quality. I try to post on our blog every day, and I also try to make sure that the quality is always immaculate. You should also take steps to ensure that your website is rapidly responsive and easy to navigate. Having a high-quality CTA is also critical to making sure that your website visitors convert into leads.
You should make sure that the colour palettes on your website are pleasing to the eye and will keep your users’ attention. If you’re finding it challenging to build or update your website, then you should consider the possibility of using an outside digital agency. I’m biased in saying that you should use us at DMS, although you should always make sure you’re getting the right deal before committing to anything.