Today we live in the information age, where having a website is almost a must. Your presence online can either have a positive impact on you or a negative one. Despite that, is having a website, simply for the sake of it, enough? With a large number of sites available online, if you want any sort of patronage, you must learn how to make yourself stand out.
There are a number of key facts that you should be aware of, before you begin designing and building your site. These are the following:
- Close to 40% of all visitors will leave a site if they find it difficult to navigate through.
- Website owners have less than 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.
- 75% of all visitors will form an opinion about your company based on the visual representation of your website.
For this reason, when it comes to generating traffic to your site, retaining these visitors, and getting them to take action. One cannot deny that a good website design is amongst the most important factor. Web design is a very broad subject area; for this reason, a holistic approach should be adopted, where you consider the preferences of your visitors, along with the algorithmic change of the search engines. In addition to portraying information that is relevant.
With all of that said, it would be difficult to argue with the benefits that comes with hiring a web design agency to create your site. However, for those of you who are interested in going it along, here are some tips you might want to know.
1. Make the Website Responsive
If you want your site to be accessible to as many people as possible, then you have to make it responsive. The average American adult, spends around five hours on their mobile device, with close to 30% of all phone users opting to do their shopping online through their mobile devices. You want your site to offer the best possible user experience, which you can start with by making it responsive.
For the vast majority of web surfers, if they stumble upon a site that they find difficult to either read or browse through, then they will usually leave, in favour of a competitor. A non-responsive website also negatively effects its position and status within the major search engines, making it more difficult for people to find the site when they search on topics.
2. You Need a Great First Impression
For the vast majority of visitors, your website is what they will use, to form an impression about your company. They will form a fairly weighty impression, based upon how you put your site together, so it’s very important that it looks and works well. If you have a site, but it isn’t being kept regularly up-to-date or it doesn’t provide users with the best user experience, or maybe it’s not responsive or it takes far too long to load up, then all these things can adversely affect how people perceive your company.
If you want people to visit your site and remain on it, then your site must look appealing. People should be able to visit your site and immediately know what it’s about, what sort of business it is and exactly what it offers.
3. Virtual Chat
More and more people nowadays have a preference for quick online chat, while they surf a website. They like to know that there’s a service that they can use to get additional information on a service or product. Whether or not they opt to use it, is irrelevant, as your main objective is to build trust.
4. Contact Information should be Above the Fold
If you have a business that relies on people being able to get in contact with your sales team, then you must position your contact information where it is easiest to find.
Your contact information should be positioned ideally at the top of your webpage, so that web surfers don’t have to go browsing through various pages to find it. Be sure to include all applicable information, whether it be an address or phone number.
If you have a social media presence, that you use to connect with your customers, then be sure to include all links either in the header or footer of your website. Basically, where it is easiest for others to find.
Read:Transform Your Business with Influencer Marketing Solutions
5. Professionalism Builds Trust
If you have a site that was professionally designed and constructed then you can be sure that it would build the necessary trust with your potential clients. Impressions are created in a split second, so you need something that stands out. A website that is properly and effectively designed, that is easy to browse through, will more easily and readily retain any visitors that stumble upon it. You want to keep your customers on your site for as long as possible, so that you can peddle your products to them. A site that is poorly designed, not only leaves a negative impression of your products, but also of your company as a whole.
6. Call to Action
Every page on your site should have a call to action, which tells the visitor what you want them to do. Your pages are like little landing pages, which should encourage the visitor to carry out a certain action, whether its signing up to a service, calling your company, purchasing a product, downloading a PDF white paper, or some other objective that benefits your company. Give them something that is inviting, something that encourages them to do whatever it is, you want them to do, like a link, button or just clearly defined text. Make sure everything is positioned above the fold, this way, people don’t have to journey so far before they are given instructions on what it is you want them to do.
7. Go with a Simple Site Design
Try to limit the amount of colours, fonts and images you have on your site, as they can distract the customer, by pulling their eyes away from the true prize. Shorter paragraphs coupled with bullet points, makes your information more scan-able and easier to read.
Experts suggest you keep your paragraphs no longer than six lines.
This is even more important when you have a site that is responsive, which is one of several factors that the major search engines use when ranking a website. You want your site to feature as high as possible in the search engines, as that means more traffic to the site. Having a mobile friendly site is just one of several factors that you can take advantage of to help push your site higher up in the search engine listings.
AUTHOR INFO
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.
