Every business who is wanting to broaden their reach and compete with local competitors has to have a website. It is a vital tool that attracts new customers, informs current customers and at a minimum works as an online business card for your company. An attractive website will certainly improve your reputation, as opposed to a poorly built website which could potentially damage it. Which leads us to the question “What Are The Features Of A Well Designed Website?”
Add a Mission Statement – The majority of website visitors base an opinion on your website or business within 3 seconds of landing on your website. If they don’t understand what your website is about or what service you’re offering, you’re increasing the chances of them leaving for another website. Add a clear mission statement at the top of your page about what you do and make it highly relevant to your local area or nice that you are targeting.
For example:
[our company] provides [our services] to local customers in [town] at affordable prices!
This is a basic example, but immediately any website user will recognise what you do and it will decrease the chances of them moving to a different website.
Make sure it’s easy to navigate – One of the first things Alan explains on his tutorial on “How To Build A Website” is that your website should be easy to navigate and provide users with a clear and concise page to every available. Not only does this improve user experience and stop your users from wasting time, it also helps with on page SEO and allows crawlers from search engines to also navigate and crawl your site easily.
Is your website responsive/mobile friendly? If it’s not, you’re going to need to fix that. A responsive website is one which design adapts depending on the size of the screen that it’s being viewed on. This means that I will see an optimised design if I’m browsing on an iPhone as opposed to a desktop computer. Responsive designs dramatically increase the usability of your site for mobile users and it is an absolute must in a mobile world to have a responsive website.
Improve your websites speed – Website speed is becoming more and more important. Google even openly stated that page speed plays a large part in their ranking algorithm. With the popularity of mobile phone browsing on the rise, this statement makes complete sense. The slower a website, the more bandwidth this equates to for the user which equals a poor experience. If you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins you can use to increase your website’s speed. Autoptimize, WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache to mention a few. For websites on different content management systems it may be worth speaking to your developer to see if he can optimise your website at server level.
Internal linking – This is something that is often overlooked and can be a very powerful technique to help users find their way around your website and most importantly improve your rankings. If you interlink relevant pages of your website, or especially a high page authority pages to other pages of your website you can improve their rankings safely and effectively without risking any fear of penalty or upsetting Google. In fact internal linking is encouraged by Google and if performed correctly can dramatically increase rankings of the pages you link to!
Proofread older posts – Going over your older posts can really help improve your website. You may not realise that you made typo’s at the time of writing, or maybe you’ve learned something new in those weeks which you could add to the post to improve it. Google loves to see website’s that are constantly improving and evolving and ensuring your blog posts have the correct grammar, is spelling mistake free and factually correct will not only improve your readership but also improve your websites rankings.
Add clear and concise call to actions – are you selling a service on your website? Or do you need people to pick up the phone or send you an email so you can achieve sales? If you do, adding an easy to recognise, big and bold call to action button to your website is highly recommended. Green, blue and red buttons tend to work well with grabbing users attention. In fact, a study at sitepoint showed an increase of 34% in conversions when they used a red button for their CTA’s. Ensure your text is bold and the CTA button is positioned in a prominent place on your website.
Use Contact forms instead of email addresses – If you’re interested in collecting data and tracking conversions on your website, you should be using a contact form over a standard email address. In addition to tracking conversions, it’s much easier for users to fill out a contact form. People want things done quickly and forcing them to click an email address to then open an external program slows things down. A contact form is quick and easy.
I hope these 10 methods to improve your website have helped you. All of them are fairly easy to accomplish and will hugely improve the way users interact with your website. However, these methods are just the tip of the iceberg. Improving a website depends on its current state, how well its been built, what it is built on and many other factors. Would you like to suggest any more actionable tasks that can be implemented easily to improve a website? Add them in the comments below.