Monthly Archives: July 2016

How to build a killer website

Make your website a traffic magnet

There are many reasons as to why consumers want to come back to you and your business for your services; great products/service, wonderful customer service and efficiency, just to name three.

However, you need to be able to grasp that consumers’ attention in the first place, in order to attract them to use your services. You could offer the most spectacular services, but if you cannot display these qualities through a professional and clear website, then you might as well forget it! We want to make sure that you can make the most of your website with tips and ideas from design, to multimedia, to the technical stuff that encourages your customers to click back to your website.

The Content

In order to start layering and building your website, you need to have the content ready, or at least concrete ideas of how you want your website to look and the information that will go into it. This information may include a brief overview of your business alongside images or videos and links that you would like to appear on your landing page. It should also include any necessary information that you need to add to your website, such as, cost of services and/or products, images of products and links to relevant social media sites. Without this, you will merely have a domain name!

The Knowledge

Do your research on competing businesses. Have a look at other websites for similar businesses, both successful and unsuccessful. This way you can educate yourself on what looks appealing to you if you were their consumer and what to avoid, if you think it looks clunky and unappealing. This is also a useful tactic during the creation of your website and build of your business, so you can keep up to date on who is on top on how they are attracting customers to their site. However, be careful not to plagiarise other designs or information, use the research information as a helpful guide of ‘Do’s’ and ‘Don’ts’.

The Design

Going from research on competing websites that you may have looked through, what do you notice of the more popular or successful ones? Generally, they will have a more clear and clutter-free landing page, clear titles and a clear navigational system to guide you through their site. Making sure you have a clean, brand recognizable and professional looking logo is crucial as it is what the customer first sees when they hit your landing page for the first time and how they will recognize you in the future.

If it is your first time building a brand or logo then you may benefit from spending that little bit extra on a professional to help design your logo – it is the attention to detail that will be worth it in the long run. Depending on the type of business you are, not all styles and designs of logos will have the same effect, so make sure it fits the theme of your business, for example, neutral colours and simple lettering may be used for a modern interior design company, however, bright colours with a bubble style logo will be more appropriate for a kids toy shop site. Either way, make sure it encompasses the feel and style of your business!

Note: As said previously, attention to detail is crucial! Make sure you look at every single button on your website in order to create the most appealing links to other desired pages.

The Multimedia

Having a vast variety of multimedia for your consumers to feast on is all the more appealing and encourages people to look into more depth of your website out of curiosity for what you have to offer– as Aristotle once said “All men have the desire to know”!

In the ages where social media is king, having more interesting and cryptic-at-first-glance images and short concise videos across your website will encourage your consumers to click on to your site in order to view them in greater detail, so we suggest, much like your logo and brand, that you do not skimp on these. Investing in a professional videos and photos shows will illustrate to customers that you really take care of all aspects of your business.

The Technical

We know what you’re thinking… ‘Technical’ = Boring. Things such as making sure all your links work and getting yourself to the top of search engines is the sort of stuff that makes the world that is your website spin with greatness, however, it can often be the most time consuming and frustrating part of the process.

Checking all of the finer details and all of the more technical aspects of moving your website through the ranks and to be the top choice of service in your particular field. It is also important to make sure your site has many links to and from it for many reasons; having a larger amount of links going to and from your website is important to show how active it is, however, you want those links to be trustworthy and coming from a quality source.

Having 100 links from spam websites that are linked to yours won’t install trust in your site and users, which in turn, reflects in your business; having 50 links that go back to your website through trusted sources, i.e. non-profit organisations, government websites, etc. will create trust in your domain. Keep your links as fresh as possible! Keeping up to date and making sure that the links going to and from your website are still popular and relevant is important on keeping your site up to date.

 

Simple Tips on How to Drive Traffic to Your New Website

Whether it’s the interview of your dreams or the date of your dreams, here at Stormnet Media,  we believe that first impressions are crucial. We cannot stress enough how important it is to have that first step polished. Whether it is your new website or you are launching a new app, it is important to make sure that it is not only ready to impress your consumers, but it is finished and launched with a cherry on top. It is that extra ‘je ne sais quoi’ that takes a mediocre pop record to a legendary hit, so with that in mind, we have put together some simple tips that will take your website from ‘one-hit-wonder’ to ‘hall-of-fame’ chart topper!

Content, content, content!

No article on our website would be complete without discussing our favourite topic, and that is… Content! We love content. However, it is no good just thinking about the initial launch and beginning processes. Even if you have the most incredible content to launch with your new site and you have your target audience hooked, it would not maintain its credibility if it was not nurtured and developed. This means making sure that you have enough ideas for new content as possible, in order to keep your consumers updated as consistently as possible. If you upload new videos, blogs or images to your website every Wednesday, stay committed. It is important that your audience sees you are passionate about growing your business by keeping them informed, and will make customers more likely to want to come back to your site or app in order to check out the new content.

Research

Before you can upload the wonderful content that you have waiting and ready to go, make sure that you have thoroughly done your research. Searching the latest trends on social media, website forums relating to your business or similar topics and keeping track of changes within your business world with email alerts will help to consistently develop your business. Keeping up to date with the latest news and social goings on surrounding the business that you are trying to launch will open your eyes to both the competition and help you to judge better on predicting what might be the next step forward for your business. It depends what type of new business you are launching, but sometimes it is even worth asking, what the savvy social world call ‘social influencers’. These are the people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that are known for having the most followers, simply for tapping into niche markets and turning them into trends. In the creative industries, such as fashion and music, it can be a massive leap in popularity and drive for your website if associated with these online forces.

Bold, Bright and Social

In world where now communicate through text, video and imagery, whether it is for business or pleasure, you would be correct in thinking that it is an important part of the western culture. No matter what business you are, it would be silly not to keep your website or app updated with new images and videos to catch the consumers interest. Keeping the multimedia content on your site user friendly is super important; it is simple things such as keeping the images on your website ‘pinterest-friendly’ to encourage your potential customers to do a little bit of advertising for you by ‘re-pinning’ your most recent images. It may not have to be an image either, if your company is a lot more keen on spreading a message, then attaching ‘memes’ to your site with ideas such as inspirational quotes or interesting info graph’s that link back to your website, will drive in more and more people. However, be sure to keep video content short and sweet. With the culture of social media, it is that instant gratification that people are now used too, videos on Instagram and Vine are often between 6-15 seconds long! Yet, it is these short videos that seem to go viral on the web within minutes of them being posted online.

Stay Interactive

As we have mentioned earlier on in this article, keeping your content updated is important, in order to show customers that you are developing as a business in order to tailor to their needs. This is also true with looking at, discussing and changing with feedback. There is nothing worse than feeling as though a business you have recently bought into has, not only not lived up to the customer’s expectations, but then also, not taking on their feedback positively or even at all. As long as it is appropriate for the style of business that you are creating and ensuring that you have the man power for it, it may be worth taking advantage of all the fantastic platforms within your reach in order to get in touch with your customers. People like to know that their voice is being heard, so being able to assist people and further their experience with your company, it may lead to free advertising in the form of ‘Word of Mouth’ from your most loyal customers.

SEO

Many people shy away from the, often mammoth, task of making sure that you have effective and working links to and from your website. Your site should be SEO friendly in order to optimize the amount of traffic that you could potentially be driving to your site, should you be doing it correctly. As long as you have both on-line and off-line link backs to your website with titles that incorporate the most popular search terms relating to your site, then the more people you will be attracting and help you to climb the rankings on search engines such as Google. Be careful with your link backs and ensure that the sites that are linking your audience to you website are reputable and trusted sites, because as we said, first impressions count, therefore, people won’t want to click on your site if you are linked to a dodgy or untrusted site. Simple things such as using relevant terms and phrases attached to the images on your site; using key words in the titles and headers on your page or simply creating shareable content that is of high quality using key words and interesting headings will ensure the click-count becomes higher.

There are many more things that we would love to advise you on, so if you would like more information on how to maximize the potential of your website or app then please don’t hesitate to contact us!