Robyn Rivera
You don’t necessarily need to work with a professional website designer to build a professional website. In fact, when you start with a professional, customizable design template, like the ones you’ll find here at Websites 360®, it’s easy to build a great business website.
But, even when you start with the right design template, there are a few things that you need to be aware of when building your own website. Here are a few things you need to know before you get started.
You may have a lot of information to provide your clients with, but you should refrain from overwhelming them with too much information in a single space. If your website is overly cluttered, it will only confuse the message and muddy the path through the sales funnel.
A clutter-free design with plenty of strategic white space is a much more effective option than a design that’s too busy or includes too many elements. When you surround the main CTA (call to action) and other important features of your page, it’s like shining a spotlight on them. It ensures that there’s nothing competing for your visitor’s attention.
Not only is a clutter-free design more effective, but it’s also cleaner and more professional looking.
People don’t come to your website just because. They come to your website to learn more about the services or products you offer, and to learn more about your business, in general.
The fact of the matter is that you’ve probably got a lot of competition online. Unless you offer something no one else does, or have figured out a way to meet a need that no one else can, you need to be able to differentiate yourself online. That is done in many different ways, but one of the most effective is by making the information on your website easy to read and understand.
In addition to creating content that helps your visitors get to know your brand and your products or services, your website is a great place to use your expertise and experience to inform people about your industry.
Not only will creating informative, easy-to-read content help you educate and inform your visitors, but it will also help your website to rank higher in the organic search results.
When someone visits your website, they will decide, in a matter of seconds, if they want to stick around or not. And, if those precious seconds are taken up by loading the page, the chance that they’ll push that back button is just too high.
If there’s one thing the modern internet user is accustomed to, it’s speed. Back in dial-up days, you could go and get a snack in the time your typical website loaded, but those days are gone. People not only want near-immediate load times; they expect it. If your website doesn’t live up to their expectations, they’re going to move on to one of your competitors.
In addition to providing a good user experience to your visitors, having a fast-loading website is an important part of ranking in the organic search results. Google doesn’t often give many indications about its algorithm, so the fact that they’ve said that page speed is a ranking factor is a big deal.
Most people who visit your website these days are not doing so from a laptop or desktop computer; most are visiting your website from a mobile device, like a smartphone or a tablet. That means that your website needs to be just as functional and provide just as good of user experience for people using a mobile device as people using a computer.
Building a mobile-friendly website starts with a responsive design, which is a design that will automatically reconfigure itself based on the device it’s being viewed on. Responsive design eliminates the need to have a separate mobile site, and it’s an absolute must for any modern website.
However, responsive design is just the first step in building a mobile-friendly website. It’s also important to ensure that text is big enough and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read on a smaller screen, and that buttons are big enough and that the space around them is clear enough that they’re easy to click with a finger or a thumb.
As I mentioned, when someone comes to your website, they’re looking for something specific. They might be coming to your website to learn more about your company, or they might be visiting to compare your products or services to another company’s. Whatever the reason they are visiting your website, you need to make it easy for them to find what they need, and that means that you need to make your site easy to navigate.
There are a lot of aspects of your website where a little creativity and out-of-the-box thinking go a long way, but your website navigation isn’t one of them. There’s a reason why basic menu navigations are so popular — people are comfortable with them and know how to use them.
In addition to having a simple navigation system that people are used to using, it’s also a good idea to include a search bar on your website. That way, people can directly search what they’re looking for if they’re in a hurry.
Having a website is no longer optional for businesses these days, but that doesn’t mean that you have to spend an arm and a leg hiring a designer. With a little know-how and an easy-to-use website builder, anyone can do it! Get started today.
Originally published on 5/11/20