Living in the digital world, a website is now a necessity for a business, whether big or small. If you have a business and don’t have a website, you are probably losing a number of great opportunities for your business. Your website is a great opportunity for your business to market itself online. The foundation of success for any website or internet business is traffic. Without website traffic there is no-one to visit your website. Your web has a far wider reach than any other form of advertising. However for your website to have a wide range of traffic they are important elements you need to put into consideration for your website to be visible. The following article will guide you through.
1. User friendly website navigation
A clear navigation, makes visitors stay and have a good experience, which ultimately leads to more business for you.
Having a strong Internet presence is necessary. You want to grow and attract new customers, but if your site is not user-friendly then you are doing business more harm than good. It is so important that your website is easy to navigate through. The easier your site is to navigate through, the more time a user will spend on your website, which in turn means your bounce rate will decrease.
2. Excellent visual design
Visual appeal is what meets the eye. It’s the colors, shapes, pictures, fonts, white space, and overall visual balance of a design. Whether a website appeals to us affects how we perceive it, how we use it, and how we remember it. Excellent visual design helps your website to fulfill the following objectives:
i) Attract attention
Visual design can – more than anything – attract attention. This is key to getting visitors engaged with your website. Customers like to look at pretty things and if they have the choice, they always prefer an attractive design or image over an ugly or neutral one. The bright, creative artworks immediately draw the user’s attention while adding both energy and aesthetic appeal to what is usually considered as uninteresting.
ii) Create a first impression
Our first impression when meeting someone face-to-face can affect our relationship with them in the long term. It affects whether or not we like someone, if we think we can trust them, and if we intend to meet that person again. Basically, within only a few seconds – maybe minutes, we can decide if we enjoy spending time with someone or not.
iii) Build relationships
Excellent visual design can also build relationships. If customers can identify your website, you are a huge step closer to building a long-term relationship with them – which is, the main goal of creating a website as a business.
3. Easy and informative content
Good content is what sets your website apart from the masses and delivers the right message into the hearts and minds of your customers. The success of your website is determined primarily by its content. The content of your website should always begin with proper market research. Your taglines must deliver a clear value proposition and include an effective call to action. The key to a successful website is having easy, informative and keyword-rich content that delivers the right message with power and conviction. Content on your website should target your audience, engage them and persuade them to take action.
4. Clear and visible call to action
A call to action is a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action. It is typically written as a command, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and generally takes the form of a button or hyperlink. Without a clear call to action the user may not know the next steps to take to purchase a product or sign up for a newsletter and is likely to leave the site without accomplishing their task. Call to action should be designed in the way that visitors during the tour to your website in order to seek information should know more about the product and services you offer simultaneously.
5. Detailed ‘about us’ on who you are
The content is what people visit your website for/or social media profiles, the first place they go is your landing page. When a website visitor decides to go to the about us page, he or she is on a fact-finding mission, as well as looking for the “story” of your business. If your website merely speaks about your products and/or services, you are selling it short.
Your about us page is an excellent way to communicate to your visitors who you are and to give them the confidence to understand that you and your business possess the skills and experience that they need to be able to solve their particular problems. Your about us page should answer the following questions:
- Who are we?
- Why should you choose us over someone else?
- What do we do?
- When did we start?
- How do we do it?
It is in this about us page that you include testimonies so that your website visitors will get to trust your services and products. There for it is of vital importance to include a detailed about us page that describes who you are to your website visitors.
6. Responsive web design
Responsive web design creates a system for a single site to react to the size of a user’s device with one content source. A responsive website has a fluid and flexible layout which adjusts according to screen size. Responsive Web Design is important because it offers an optimized browsing experience, your website will look great and work well on a desktop (or laptop), a tablet, and a mobile phone’s browser. Website responsiveness is also a great way to refine the content on your site, making sure that those using a mobile device are only seeing the most essential information.
7. Contact information
Contact information is also another special element that should be included when creating a website. Having contact details on your website is a must because as a professional company why would you hide your contact details on your website. However, there is low chance that someone will go ahead with a company if one doesn’t feel he/she can trust your website. Similarly, if someone doesn’t trust a company, he will hesitate to purchase its products. Therefore, having your phone number on display could greatly increase your conversion rate.
Conclusion
In conclusion, living in the digital world, a website is now a necessity for a business, big or small. If you have a business and don’t have a website, you are probably losing a number of great opportunities for your business. Therefore they are important elements that a web designer must consider when creating a website. These include a user friendly website navigation, excellent visual design and other elements stated in the article.