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How to Get the Most out of Your Business Website – Top 5 Tips

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John Tailor
How to Get the Most out of Your Business Website – Top 5 Tips

If you still think that a quality, well-maintained website isn’t absolutely necessary for your business, you are dead wrong! Without one, no one will take you seriously; in fact, if you’re not on Google, you basically don’t exist. Regardless of whether you’re looking to redesign your website or are coming up with a brand new one, it requires focus and dedication. In fact, your website is a vital part of building your business profile, offline as well as online. Here are some useful tips to get you started.

Always keep your goals in mind

Without goals, your plan is bad and a bad plan cannot result in anything good. Knowing the purpose of your site, as well as how you’re expecting it to support your business is of absolute essence. Are you trying to gain leads? Are you trying to gain bookings? Do you need it to provide your clients with information? Should its role be increasing newsletter signups? Or do you want to use it to sell your products? In any case, you need to be aware of the goals so that you can adjust the design and build the site accordingly.

Ease of use

There is nothing worse than a poorly-made website and, unfortunately, there are many categories your online presentation can fail at. Even if your website is the latest responsive CSS3/HTML5-bootstrapped piece of technological artwork, this doesn’t mean that it is perfectly user-friendly. So, don’t forget to optimize it and make it easy to use.
Although usability is not a simple part of a good web design, here are some key points to get things going:

Navigation – Your website needs to be intuitive and consistent. For example, not every website entry will occur via home page, so keep the navigation consistent across the entire site.

Readability – A text that’s difficult to read will deter your visitors almost immediately. Besides, it will make you seem unprofessional, as well. Make sure that your text isn’t obscured by background images and, for the love of the Internet, do NOT use Comic Sans.

Link recognition – if you don’t make sure that your hyperlinks are easily recognizable, no one will follow them.

Important information – seeing as how we engage in a left-to-right reading direction, make sure that your most important information rests at the top left corner of the page.

Think about the user – All the functions, widgets and slideshows in the world won’t help your readers achieve their goals unless your website is optimized. It’s all about optimization, and optimized hosting for WordPress is the best way to go.

Use quality photos

At first glance, a website with low-quality photos represents a bad visual environment and ‘visual environment’ is basically what web is all about. Make sure that the photos you use are of high quality and optimized for web. Also, a website without any photos is a no-go!

Your content should be fresh and engaging

Once your website visitors have moved past the first impression that the quality photos have left on them, they will focus on your content. Good content should not only engage your visitors, but also encourage them to come back, so you should be aiming at regular blog posts, updated galleries, videos or information – keep them coming, so that your content remains fresh.
Protip: use social media to notify people about new content.

 

Make it mobile-friendly

The growth of the smartphone industry has made many companies focus on the mobile versions of their websites. In fact, seeing as how nearly 60% of Google searches now come from mobile devices, it would be a huge mistake to miss out on this. Not only should you come up with a mobile version of your website, but you should also focus on making it as user friendly as possible.

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