When you’re creating a website, it’s easy to get caught up in all the cool stuff out there and go overboard with bells and whistles that do nothing other than slow your site down and make it look cluttered, confusing and difficult to use. Alternatively, you might get so confused by all the available options that you end up with a site that’s no more than bare bones and totally underwhelming. Here are some website tips to help you get it right:
Great content
Probably the most important thing for any website is to have great content. Exactly what great content is will depend on what your customers need from the site. Just keep in mind when you’re creating content that it has to fill the customers need or they’ll go elsewhere. It’s also a good idea to splash out on a copywriter to get great content that’s well written and also helps with your SEO.
Easy to navigate
Nobody likes a website where you can’t find anything and in fact, your customers will probably not bother trying and go elsewhere. Make sure you have a clear menu at the top of each page and maybe even one at the bottom of the page as well. Then there are some pages that every website should have: Home, About, Testimonials, Products/Services and Contact. Note that if you have a lot of a lot of pages, don’t add a menu item for each page! Keep your top level menu items to 5-6 at the most.
Mobile friendly
The number of people searching for and browsing websites on tablets and mobile devices is growing rapidly. If your website doesn’t look great and work well on mobile devices you could be losing a large chunk of your potential website views. Some industries find mobile traffic is responsible for over 50% of their website views – if your website isn’t mobile friendly, that’s half of your potential customers that will be going elsewhere. These days, most themes are mobile friendly, so there’s really no excuse for not having a mobile friendly website.
Contact details
Sounds like a no-brainer, but it should be easy to find your contact details. There’s a school of thought that says you should have your phone number in the top right corner of your website, and it’s a good idea unless you don’t want clients contacting you by phone. I also think it’s a good idea to have a contact form NOT your email address, so that people can contact you online, and an idea of where you are geographically even if you are virtual. I only have my suburb, state and country on my website as I don’t allow drop-ins, but I’m happy for people to know roughly where I am if they need to physically give me something or want to meet in person before working together.
Branding
If you regularly read my blog, this will come as no surprise to you. It’s hugely important that everything you produce looks like it comes from you, and nowhere is it more important than on your website. Make sure you use your fonts (or at least something similar), your business graphics including logos and staff pictures, your business colours and the tone you use in your business communications.
Social media integration
You should integrate social media in two ways, firstly you should link to your social media accounts to allow your customers to follow you and keep up to date on what’s happening in your business. You should also provide links on articles and images that allow people to share them on social media, thereby giving you a bit of free advertising.
SEO
Website SEO is important but in my opinion, it’s a waste of time to spend money engaging someone who promises to get you on the front page of Google. There’s no way that will be a viable long-term strategy unless you’ve got very deep pockets to keep it going indefinitely. Instead, research the best keywords for your customers, offer great content, make your website easy to use and if you’re totally confused, have a look at this article by Hobo which explains a lot about SEO and what Google is looking for. Also, I use Yoast to help optimise my website pages and blog posts.
Security
Hacking isn’t something that just happens to big websites, it happens to websites like yours and mine all the time as well. I’ve already written a post on how to Make Your WordPress Website More Secure which pretty much covers all the important stuff. But the highlights are: Use a good password, update regularly and use WordFence.
Backups
No matter how secure your website is and how good you are about updating, there are still a million things that can go wrong with your website and having a recent backup is essential. I use Updraft Plus which automatically backs up my website to Dropbox (there are a heap of other options as well). So if anything does go wrong with my website, I know I’ve got an up-to-date version ready to reload.
So that’s my 9 favorite website tips that should help you create a website that does exactly what you and your customers want it to do.
