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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.
