You’ve heard it again and again. You want your business to flourish? Get a website. A website can validate your business to potential customers by making you seem more legitimate. It can act as a sales funnel, bringing in organic digital shoppers who might purchase your products or services.
It can also provide your regular customers with the information they need to use your products or visit your physical location. You need a website.
The thing is, not all websites are created equal. When setting up a webpage for your business, you’re looking to create a piece of digital real estate that is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing, useful to your clients, effective at building an audience, and is respectful of users’ personal data.
The following will break down these qualities in more detail so that you have a better understanding of the qualities your website needs.
A Good Website Is Functional
When talking about website functionality, we mean having links that work and having features presented in an intuitive order so that people can find their way around the site. This also means ensuring your site is optimized for multiple devices: computer, tablet, and mobile phone. Mobile phones now account for over half of the world’s internet usage.
If you’re unsure about your website’s functionality, have a group of people beta test it. This is when you give several people the link and ask them to find basic things on your site: your opening hours, your phone number, an article on a specific topic. Pay attention to how long it takes them to find these things and adjust accordingly. Most users don’t want to wait for information.
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A Good Website Is Easy On The Eyes
Trends in website design are changing all the time. It might be a good idea to take a look at your design (the colors, composition, and layout) every few months and ask yourself what feels dated.
Take a little time learning about what colors and fonts are most comfortable to read and what psychological effect colors have on people. You can change the entire feeling of a site by tinting the colors one way or the other.
A Good Website Is Useful
You’ve probably also heard that content is king. If you want people regularly coming back to your site, you need to provide them with useful information.
It can be entertaining, informative, or any other type of use you can think of. It just needs to provide some level of value. If you don’t want to be churning out regular content, you still need to make sure all the information your clients need is easy to find on your site.
You might want to include a frequently asked questions section (your employees will also thank you for this because they won’t need to answer the same questions on end anymore).
You might want to include a guide on how to use your product or service or how to prepare for a visit. You almost always want reviews. Generation Z, in particular, uses reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. If you want to keep up with the next generation of shoppers, reviews are non-negotiable.
A Good Website Brings More People To You
Part of managing a good business site involves using the platform to bring viewers, customers, clients, and audience members to you. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that communicates to search engines that your site is useful to people.
Search engines should recommend your page when people search for questions or ideas related to your business if done well.
Keeping your metadata descriptions strong, securing high-quality backlinks, and working with long-tail keywords are some of the bigger steps you’ll need to take, according to online marketers from Aaron Knight. It might take some time to get used to the extra step of optimizing your content, but the rewards will be well worth it.
Also Read: Comparium: Automated Website Testing Tool
A Good Website Protects Its Visitors
More and more, people are cluing into the fact that websites and applications have been stealing their personal information and selling it to the highest bidder.
Customers want to know that you take their security seriously. You need to know what information is being collected and where it goes, and you need to have this information available for viewers on your site.
By focusing on the above qualities, you’ll find yourself with a high-functioning website representing you and your business in the digital world. Remember that technological developments are always happening.
This means that you can’t just launch your site and leave it. You need to be checking back at least every few months to make sure you’re adjusting to the new algorithms and customer expectations.