Much like your favorite cake, a website needs to consist of well-researched ingredients to make the perfect product. You may have the core ingredients, but if you forget to add one, the quality can be compromised. To help you avoid cooking up a disaster, here are the 3 ingredients of a great website.
Your website is more than likely the first introduction a potential customer has to your business, and so you must take every step to ensure that your website’s visual design is appealing. Hopefully, you will have conducted adequate research into who your business is targeted at, and now you have this information, use it to create a website to appeal to their sensibilities.
Keep your website design balanced and restrict the colors and fonts that you use. Your design should be consistent and be supportive of the user experience. Don’t be afraid of white space – you can use it to boost the visibility of your design elements, so avoid overfilling the pages. You need to use it to guide your visitors through to check out, so you don’t want calls to action to be lost!
Users of the internet predominantly use mobile devices. This means that your website’s design needs to be responsive across the myriad of ways for accessing it. It is critical that you provide visitors with great user experience, so no stone should be left unturned in seeking a solution for a responsive quick loading website. Speed is essential, so investigate the best hosting for your site and how you can lessen the download burden; reducing image size, for example.
Your design should reflect your business’s story and brand. Consumers want to know who they are dealing with and your website should be able to convey your business’s story and brand in an authentic way that promotes engagement.
The content on your page needs to fulfill your business agenda but also be written for the users. It needs to be written in a way that engages them and makes them want to build a relationship with your business. The content on your page, while customer-centric, must also appeal to the search engines’ bots.
Organic search remains the most cost-effective way of attracting visitors to your website, and the content that you post needs to be optimized for search engines. Research the keywords that are applicable to your business and identify which ones are likely to be most effective for you. There’s a fine balance between using very competitive keywords and ones that are likely to get you ranked on the first page of the SERPs. Minor tweaks to your keywords can improve your ranking position!
There is no single magic formula for creating the ideal website for your business; however, by including these three key ingredients, you are increasing the chance of success. You should always aim to create a website that is visually relevant to your target audience and populate it with content that they, and the search engine’s bots, will engage with.