By Matt Puddephat
With competition fierce and the economy fragile, it's never been more important for businesses to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself and with 3.5 billion searches on Google each day, the internet has never been such an important draw for this industry.
However, with every opportunity, there's risk. With so much choice available to consumers, how do you make sure your website stands out and creates a good first impression?
Here is a quick guide to the 6 things you should consider when building or refreshing your website:
1. Have a clear role for your website
Often, businesses can jump in to creating their website without too much thought on how they should use it. The best websites put the needs of their audience first with content carefully constructed to support a set of specific identified customer goals. Think about what you want a potential customer to do when they visit your website - request a quote, buy online, download a brochure or simply feel comfortable that you are a legitimate, successful business? When you have formed a view, you can focus your content and design on making it as easy as possible for them to do just that. At WebRelief, we can help businesses and brands to identify the role their website should play and mobilise teams of specialists to redesign your website to fullfill your business objectives. If you are a small business owner, our very own web content management system uses page templates that are specfically designed to support the varied needs of small businesses. Importantly, we can build them with the minimum of fuss and you can feel safe in the knowledge, that your website has been built to support your customer's need.
2. Understand what messages you want to communicate on your website
When you are building or redesigning your website, it is easy to get excited about every detail of the products and services you offer but just because you know them inside out, doesn't mean your customers want to or indeed need to. If you are targeting product specialists then the more detail the better but if it's an end-user, what your product does can often be far more important than how it actually does it. Think about who you are targeting and therefore the messages you need to communicate. Sometimes, outlining the services you offer with some important proof points is far better than confusing customers with industry talk that only experts like yourself may understand.
At WebRelief, we will get under the skin of who your audience is and help you to communicate your products and services in a way that suits their needs.
3. Make the website navigation as simple and intuitive as possible
Website navigation is about how easy it is for people to move around your website and consume the information they are looking for. Keep navigation simple and make sure the labels are descriptive, try to categorise your main navigation points effectively to avoid confusion and be single-minded about the journeys you want your visitors to take. Simple journeys with sensible value-added sign posts will help you and your customers to acheive their objectives.
At WebRelief, our team of User Experience Architects are experts in building customer journeys against a range of different scenarios we have identified for your business.
4. Make sure your website looks visually appealing
The best designs are often the simplest and often, the little details can make all the difference. Use clean, unfussy font styles, stick to just a few colours which can be applied consistently across your website and give content space to breath. Any successful brand has a clear set of guidelines to follow and at WebRelief, our team of experienced digital designers are experts in extending your brand presence through a visually appealing web platform.
5. Ensure customers can view your website whilst they are on the go
It's highly likely that potential customers will visit your website whilst on the move. This means it is vitally important that your website is responsively designed so it looks great no matter what screen size you are viewing it through. At WebRelief, we design websites "mobile-first", this is because a smaller screen size has the greatest constraints for design so it's better designing for mobile in the knowledge that your website design can be easily adapted to work for the bigger desktop and tablet screens.
6. Keep your website up to date
There is nothing worse than out of date content. Apart from frustrating your website visitors, it can also give the impression that you are not as on top of your business as you should be. At WebRelief, we appreciate this can be a challenge because it can be costly and difficult to keep your website up to date and that's why, with our web content management system, we have made it easy for you to update your website yourself. Of course, we can help but there is nothing to stop you updating pricing, menus, services opening hours etc. It's really easy.
