Having a website for your business has become a requirement as everyone spends more and more time online now a days. Is your website setup for maximizing the visitor’s conversion rate, your business’ online presence, and doing what it’s really supposed to do?
You have only 3 secs to impress the visitor and make them stick to your website. (You can also hear my presentation on this topic in a video below).
Your home. Your way.
Building a website is like building your home. All these years I have seen my friends building a house with fervor, preferences and ideas. In my discussions with them I noted down points that most of them have in common.
We always want to build a home that looks better than our neighbors. Create an interesting design and theme to give a character to the home and that people can relate to. The plan is to make the room to room access simple so there is easy way to maneuver between the walls. Use elegant décor and presentation with a good mix of colors and concepts.
Make sure the house structure, design; colors follow the housing rules, and local restrictions and policies. Add furniture, items that go with the flow and help enhance the beauty of the house. Build it in a location that is easily accessible and that people can find it seamlessly when looking for it.
Did you read between the lines?
Building a website is like building your home. Nothing different.
- Latest trend design: Follow a latest trend design and features to make your website look better in standards than your competitor.
- Ease of use: Usability is the first and foremost requirement for a good website. Simple and easy to use sites gain more popularity and are followed by the large online community. Google is a great example for this. Easy navigation around the website makes the user comfortable and browse through your site easily and to spend more time on your site.
- Company branding: All the colors, graphics, logo and text used on the website have to reflect the business promise to the visitors. Any extensions to your website, like blogs, Facebook business page, Twitter background, YouTube branding should match the branding. It is important to have all the promotional materials like business cards, flyers, html email templates have same look and feel.
- Web standards: Design, coding standards when followed result in a website that is completely Search Engine Friendly. These standards help in building search engine optimization in the back scenes helping to get better ranking and search engine placement on the web.
- Content is King: Fill the website with content more appropriate to business model, services and profile. Rotate the keywords in the content repeatedly in all the pages to generate good onsite search engine optimization. Write content in simple sentences, with common words, and easy vocabulary. Avoid any acronyms or confusing statements.
- SEO: Probably you heard this acronym more than anything now. SEO is Search Engine Optimization that helps your website to come up on Google’s organic search results,    preferably on the first page. When your website is completely optimized to appear on the first pages of Google you have a better chance of people visiting your site. More traffic means more visitors to customers’ conversion ratio.
Finally, also remember
- Cross-browser compatibility – We live in a browser nightmare with many browsers around and more coming up. The most popular ones are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera etc. Make sure the website is completely standardized to run, work and look same on all the browsers. BTW, Google’s Chrome is awesome for browsing websites. It’s fast, user friendly and interactive.
- Flash animation – Say big NO-NO to flash. Flash on websites is old school (until unless you are in gaming or music industry). The pages with flash load slower, they are expensive in design and hard to customize (‘can’t-do-yourself’ thingy). Also, animations are not Search engine and mobile (iPhone, Android) friendly. So, be wise (very wise) in deciding to use them on your websites. You can achieve similar affects using JavaScript frameworks like JQuery etc. JavaScript frameworks are search engine friendly, load faster and easily customizable.
- Social Media Integration: As Social media is gaining momentum all businesses are embarking on using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Blog as a branding and marketing mediums. As you write content on all these sites it is very important for them to flow back into your website so the visitors can check your network feeds to build heavy duty optimization and credibility. Read a blog post on this in depth here.
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