Your company’s website is one of the most important things to get right. This is the first impression most people will get of your business, it’s the very thing that could persuade them to make an order with you or put them off completely. The better your website is, the more sales and traffic you’re likely to generate which of course means more success for your business. Is yours up to scratch? Here are some things to consider.
Navigation
Your website needs to be easy to navigate, a customer should be able to click around the site easily to get the information they need. Avoid anything that makes this more difficult even at the expense of looking good, as your customer may well get frustrated and give up if they can’t find what they’re after or it’s difficult to use the site. Keep things like menu bars and buttons consistent across your website.
Organisation
As well as easy to navigate, the way your information is organised is also important. Each page should be properly laid out with information presented well. Text should be split into paragraphs with subheadings, this allows users to skim for the information they need. This is how most people tend to browse so make it easy for them, big chunks of text could well put them off.
Search
On a well organised website, not everything is going to be visible on the main page. For this reason you need a search bar so that people can find the content and information they need without having to trawl the entire site. Make things difficult for people and they could take their custom elsewhere.
Aesthetics
Your site should look smart and professional. Dark text on a white background, there should be no annoying popups, cluttered ads everywhere, fancy fonts or graphics which look amateur and slow the loading time down. You will need to ensure that your site is optimised for different devices and browsers. Your best bet is to invest money and pay for a professional web designer.
Contact Information
One of the most important pages on your website is a contact page. This should provide a landline telephone number, a site like Planet Numbers can provide you with an 0800 number or business number if needed. It should have a business email address, in a format similar to ‘[email protected]’ compared with ‘[email protected]’. These two things show your company is legitimate and professional and will give customers peace of mind.
A Blog
A company blog will benefit your website in many ways. First of all, it helps drive more traffic to your website. Every time you write a blog post, this means another indexed page on your site. This is useful as it provides you with more opportunity to show up in search engines and therefore can help you to gain you traffic to your website in organic search. Blog posts also have the potential to be shared across social media too, which again will drive more traffic to you.