A “good” website isn’t going to be enough to break through and convert users into engaged customers. What you need is a great website.
Your site reflects your company, your products, your services and ultimately your brand. So it’s important to be visually appealing, polished and professional. Allow white space, uncluttered layouts with quality photographs and graphics look and let your message shine through
Equally important, the site must work quickly, correctly and as expected. Build to web standards, proofread rigorously and test regularly for problems with speed or functionality. Every page should always be fast and functional, because any of them could be a potential customer’s first or only impression. Broken, slow, or poorly constructed areas will leave your visitors frustrated and encourage them to leave.
Site visitors are wanting speed and easy navigation. Don’t make them work for information. User Experience (UX) plays a key role in helping visitors use, understand and stay on your website. Create obvious, logical navigation with clear hierarchy. Use consistent layouts and visual cues for functionality across the site.
Your site should satisfy both ‘searchers’ (coming for something specific), and ‘browsers’ (just looking). Help users accomplish their tasks quickly with onsite search, and keep them engaged by suggesting related content and minimising dead ends.
Today there are no excuses, your site must look great and work well on any platform. The growth of mobile and tablet devices is not slowing down and you just don’t know what your next visitor will be using. Optimising for mobile will improve both the experience of your visitors and your SEO Rankings.
Be succinct, interesting and new. Use language that makes sense to your audience, avoid jargon, corporate speak and acronyms. Explain your “Why.” Visitors have short attention spans: spell correctly, be accurate, be relevant and update regularly. Blogs and social media updates are great ways to add fresh content, which keeps visitors returning and helps SEO strategy. Yes, keeping things fresh requires a bit of investment. No, you can’t do without it.
Your audience won’t chase you down. Make it easy to engage, offer multiple points of contact: phone, email, social media and maybe an easy-to-use contact form. A Google map is a bonus. Above all, ensure that this information is readily available on an easy-to-find contact page.
If your site asks nothing of visitors, they will surely do nothing. What is the purpose of your site? Is that purpose clear to visitors? Even informational sites want visitors to read and share articles, follow the company on social media, download toolkits, join mailing lists or learn more about the organisation. Include a CTA (call to action) on each page.
It’s not enough to build a nice looking website that’s easy to use. It needs to earn traffic. Otherwise, all that effort in design, UX and content development will be for naught. There are hundreds of rules and guidelines for effective search engine optimisation, so here are some to start with:
Use page titles and meta tags on every page and alt tags on every image.
Optimise content on your site to align with words real people search for.
Use keywords appropriately in content and links.
Make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your content. Social can drive large volumes of traffic and positively impact your search ranking. Don’t forget obvious sharing links (even if they are rarely used in actuality).
5 THINGS A WEBSITE SHOULD INCLUDE
A CLEAR DESCRIPTION OF WHO YOU ARE
A CONTACT PAGE
SMALL CHUNKS OF INFORMATION
EASY MOBILE NAVIGATION
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS
At Green Hammer Digital we partner with Rocketspark ( A kiwi company that services clients in 27 countries) To learn more go to Rocketspark If you would like to talk about creating your Great Website contact us. Green Hammer Digital is ready to help.
