Make your website more successful
Build your website the right way to maximise conversions and make your website more successful.
A successful website needs forethought and planning, here we explore critical points to make your business stand out.
1. Research the competition
Your website is your most important marketing tool, it’s not just a showcase but a funnel for your business. If you have researched your competition, you probably can identify areas that you would do better. Do you know what your most important services or products are and how your site visitors are going to reach your goal?
2. Planning
Think about what you want the website to do. Planning a rough sitemap or flow chart to get you to focus on how you want your users to use the site from first landing on the homepage to contacting you. If you put yourself in your customers shoes think about how you want to direct them to the service or product they want. Is it going to be clear what you have to offer? After all, you want to attract customers to buy from you.
How can you make it easy for them?
3. Conversions through compelling content
The content on your website is key to how you communicate with your potential customers. If you don’t know where to start, think about those key services you want to sell and begin with baby steps – make them into bullet points that you can flesh out later. The website needs to appeal to busy people, before we get to the design stage at Double S Design we are constantly assessing how customers are going to use your site, we want it to be user friendly, easy to navigate and have natural flow.
Remember that too much text is off-putting, you want to capture your audience’s imagination as quickly as possible. Shorter sentences with easily digestible words score well with humans as well as Google. Once you have got some rough drafts ready for your new website, it’s a good idea to involve a digital marketing writer who can create interesting content with the right keywords.
4. Design Brief
Now you’ve gone through the first three steps above, it’s time to brief in your website designer. We are assuming you already have a logo and a brand in development. If not, you should consider kick-starting the brand before working on the website. Maybe take a detour here> to get an overview of how it’s of utmost importance to get your brand right from the outset.
Remember that a website can grow with you as your business develops. It can be improved over time and you or your designer can add new pages and content over the coming months or years. Getting a small site off to a good start will do more for you than trying to make the site do too much, risking watering down your offering.
5. The Design Process
All the hard work you’ve done to this point will be ruined if the website doesn’t show your business’ brand personality. A good website designer will create a site according to your brief:- graphics, colours and branding cues that are relevant to your business are critical to helping your business stand out. You don’t want to look like everyone else, but on the other hand you don’t want to be so wacky that people remember you for the wrong reasons.
Your chosen designer should be able to work to your brief and construct the site so that it maximises conversions.
Have you involved your designer early enough in this process? Engaging them at stage 1 could be more helpful and keep you working in the right direction.
6. Going Live
The most exciting part of the process, but it doesn’t end here! For a website to be more successful, you ned to think about nurturing, feeding and marketing it. It won’t act as your magnetic funnel by itself. That’s the next stage for your business.
Remember, websites need nurturing, by you and your web developer will need to take care of its well-being, a good relationship with a website designer means that your site is in safe hands.
