All businesses need a fully functional and attractive website to generate sales, boost their brand, and a hundred other things. Without a website, a company cannot build trust. Many companies think that it is okay to just list on other sites - like Rightmove, for example, but this is not good enough. A website is like a digital shop window. Without one, you are not showing the world anything of yourself. You are, in effect, hidden. This is not a good strategy and will not enable you to survive the long haul. People want to know about the companies that they buy from these days. They want to know if you are socially responsible. They want to know your vision and how you conduct business, among other things. Your website, therefore, acts as a gateway that you can control. A good website has all the relevant information readily available, it has all the functionality needed, it is concise and succinct, and it can generate sales to grow your company. If you have a website, but it is a little lacking, then you may need to completely redesign it with the below in the back of your mind. Here are a few tips to help you produce an excellent website:

Pixabay

Know Your Customer

If you a designing a shop window, then you need to know who you are trying to attract. This means that you need to embark on a lot of customer research. You want to be able to create an ideal customer diagram. The more in-depth you can be, the better. Things to consider are the types of things that they are into. What kind of person are they, a family person, a bachelor, etc.? Think about your products and how you add value to your customer's life. What are your customer's likes and dislikes, and what are their motivations? Social media gives you a great insight into your customer's personalities and how they act in the world. It will help if you drill into the way they use language too. This is not so much meaning that you mirror it exactly, but you need to embrace it to a point without seeming patronizing in any kind of way. Are they likely to be interested in any social issues, or environmental issues? In other words, what are they conscious about? The better you know your customer, the more you will be able to focus your marketing material, and that includes your website. You will be able to produce content in any form that speaks directly to them, with the ultimate aim of generating more sales and succeeding.

Develop a Brand

A brand is another key thing to have when designing a website. Your brand creates the foundation for everything. It will give you a color scheme and logo for starters. This will be coherent over every page. Your brand will give you a way to talk, it will give you the concepts that need highlighting, and you will be able to write a brand narrative, compete with future vision and have these pages for your customers to muse over. A brand is a company personality. It encompasses your philosophy of business. Your ideals, ethics, the thing that matter to you. A brand works as the foundation of your company culture. How you and your staff interact are vital, it shows that you put your money where your mouth is. Your brand needs to be created, paying close attention to your customer reach. It needs to be in harmony with what your customers think. After all, it is them that you art trying to persuade with your brand. Your website then becomes the place to showcase your brand and why your company is a good thing in the world and good for tour customers too.

Content

There are many different types of content you have:

• The written word

• Images

• Videos

• Blogs

• Vlogs

• Infographics

• Gifs

• Memes

• Testimonials

• Social Media Posts

And more. You need to use the content you employ to the best of your ability. That means that it needs to be relevant and to the point. When it comes to the written word, it may be tempting to fill a page up to save it from looking bare. This is not a good idea. You are better off with a bare page than filling it up with useless text. Customers will not read loads of irrelevant data to get to what they want to know. You may lose customers because of this. So, be succinct and concise. If you already have a site, it may be worth your while to do an entire content review. Create a bullet point for the purpose of every page and see if you have stuck to the point. If not, get your proverbial red pen out and get rid of things. This goes for your images and other content t too. Your images need to be relevant to the point. If they are not, they are going to distract from it and possibly make people wonder what it means rather than clicking the sale button. When it comes to designing the content, you already have your brand and the foundation, so that covers the style and tone. But what you need to consider is what your customer wants to see. Your home page, for example, needs to be attractive, but it needs to be relevant to why someone came there in the first place. A social media campaign pointing to your site, for example, means that the content of the post has to be shown on the homepage or the page it links to. What you have to think about is cohesion. Cohesion builds loyalty and trust. Consider all your contact working together. Each piece may be separate, but they are part of a greater whole. All your content across all your channels needs to be created with this idea in the back of your mind. 

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is all about how the search engines like Google find websites. They are a variety of measures, including searching for keywords. When one of your potential customers writes a query into the search bar Google, or your search engine of choice, runs a search across the entire web and returns results. Sites that have these keywords appear at the top of the results. The aim of any business is to get to the first page of Googe results. People do not tend to scroll past the first page, so it is in your best interests to appear here. To do this, you need to know what your customer is going to type into the search bar. This means you need to have done your research. When you write your pages, you need to include these keywords and phrases in your text. This is called SEO. Another key way the search engine finds pages is to look at how recently the content was updated. As it is not possible to constantly update your website content, you can keep it fresh by having a relevant blog on your site. You may have noticed that a lot of companies are already jumping on this bandwagon. So, do not fall behind. It is not just written content that counts, either. Video content with metadata also counts towards SEO. The search engine checks keywords within the metadata too. So this is another avenue you can explore. If you are struggling with adding keywords or are unsure of what to add or how to add it, then you can hire a digital marketing top results company to help you out. A marketing company can help you create your brand and key aspects of your marketing strategy. Because it is vital you get this right, it is a good idea to do it.  

Planning

A good site is logical and coherent. The menus are in the right place. Things fall naturally where you would expect. It is easily navigable, and it somehow just flows. What this means is that the customer experience is going to be the best it can be. If the customer experience is good, then you are more likely to get a sale. If you want your site to be like this then you need to plan it. You don't want broken links, menus that are disjoined, etc. Planning is essential for the website to flow and to ensure that everything that needs to be on there is on there.

Mobile Friendly

It is also essential that your site works on all the different devices and browsers out there. It is so easy to make a site that looks fabulous on your desktop, but when it shrinks down to the mobile, it looks awful. If you are having issues doing this, then you need professional help. You can lose so many sales from a site that looks bad on a mobile device. Also, consider using a platform like WordPress. These content management systems already have the ability to shrink a site down, so you do not have to worry about it.