The 8 main aspects to take into account to make your website a success
As of March 21, 2022, there were over 1930 billion websites operating across business verticals (Source: firstsiteguide.com). And with more being added to the list by several website design companies Every day, the competition is growing exponentially. In the segment mentioned below, we discuss the top 8 ways to make your website stand out and succeed. Also, if you want to create a new website or remodel an existing one, you can read our blog on the latest trends in web design.
#1. Clearly define your objectives: When it comes to building your website, it's important to define goals from both the business and user perspectives. Remember, your website can only deliver the goods (generate traffic, leads, and sales) if it offers what your target users want. For example, if you are a website development company and one of your goals is to offer a smooth browsing experience to your users, make sure that the website design is intuitive and that users can find each service or information easily. Additionally, if your website's bounce rate is high, then it could be a clue that your company's goals and users are not aligned, and it's time to fix them.
#2. Make a proper budget: Prepare a budget plan for your website, maintaining a balance between aspects such as design and marketing. Going for exaggeration in either aspect can ultimately boomerang. Decide on the type of website you want (e-commerce, educational, portfolio, blog, entertainment, etc.) and the right CMS platform (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) to build it on. Consider the pros and cons of investing in a standard template-based website or a custom-designed one. Keep the break-even point in mind when deciding the initial and incremental investment to pursue.
#3. Earn audience trust: Design your website to highlight your offers transparently and clearly. Know what your audiences are likely to do when they visit your website. Leverage your strength and knowledge of what motivates your target audience. Try to make your website credible to gain the trust of visitors by including relevant and complete information, for example, on the About Us page. Your target audience should know who they are dealing with rather than getting the feeling that you are just another site in the web space. Tell a credible story about your company using images and mentioning your philosophy, mission, vision and culture. At the end of the day, your website must appear legitimate before buyers can gain trust and share their credentials, including credit card details.
#4. Find ways to stand out: The key to standing out in the competition is to be different from others. This can happen even when you use a ready-made website template. Simply customize your brand images and styles and achieve differentiation. Stand out from other websites with templates that sell similar products or services by telling your story. Create a bond with your target audience by focusing on factors such as quality, price, customer service, how you give back to society and channel your profits to good causes, etc.
#5. Usability and user experience: Your target users should not have difficulty accessing information, products or services when they visit your website. Create proper landing pages that they can reach with as few clicks as possible. For example, if yours is a news website, allow users to land on the page that displays the latest news headlines of the day. Furthermore, in addition to maintaining an intuitive main menu for smooth navigation across mobile devices and desktop, also ensure easy visibility for search boxes. Don't assume that your target users are going to browse a long distance to reach their favorite content. If they find the journey too long and winding, they will bounce.
#6. Focus on SEO fundamentals: The right SEO strategy can increase your website's visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). Learn how search engine robots crawl your website and index your content. Also, make sure the basic page elements (headers, title tags, meta descriptions, etc.) are optimized. This can be achieved through semantic coding and the use of plugins. Although SEO extends beyond the page, if you can customize all page elements to search engine standards, you will not only fully represent your content to search engine bots, but also ensure that they crawl and index your website correctly. This may eventually mean winning half the battle for success.
#7. Learn from the heat map: the heat map Heat can serve as a great source of information about the user experience. Remember, many aspects that lead to the success of your website are related to user experience. Therefore, by using the right tools, you can get insights into users' activities on your website: how much they scroll, how much they fill out the form before leaving, where their mouse scrolls and where they get stuck, etc. After knowing the areas of concern, you can troubleshoot and adjust the website to ensure smooth navigation.
#8. Minimize or eliminate problems: Your website may have problems or errors, which can significantly reduce its performance level. These can include buttons not working, parts of JavaScript not running, and mobile-related UX issues, among others. Also, you may have broken something when updating a plugin using the CMS manager. So, while you may be engrossed in analyzing the numbers on the sales dashboard, you may not notice that some users are facing problems. These users will not tell you about the problems they are facing and will simply leave. Therefore, as a preventative measure, make sure the code is functional and tested on all browsers.
