Steps to a Killer Website

Delight your Visitors

Are you the kind of website owner that wants to give your website visitors a fantastic experience every time they come to your website? Do you want your customers to take action? Yes.  Then you need to make sure you meet your visitors expectations, firstly, your website design, (the look and feel), needs to be appealing to  keep your visitor.  The second key aspect covers the technical side, (the speed and resilience) and lastly there are certain marketing and sales “must haves”, (to satisfy each and every visitor and keep them coming back).

Heres what you do…

Web Design

• Use standard web conventions, don’t use unique and outrageous formats that noone’s ever seen or understands.
• Update your site content, make it interesting, compulsive and readable! Secondly, keep your content fresh with regular updating, this will not only keep your visitors returning, it will also keep the search engines coming back, ergo, more visits, more money!
• Website navigation,  keep it simple, clean and consistent, avoid javascript as its not visible by search engines. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for.
• Clear links and buttons, keep them consistent, easily understood, and regulary check they are working!
• Offer a search facility, have a sitemap – again, making it easy for your website visitor to browse and find.
  Tell your visitors how you can help them – don’t just ramble on about yourself, your offices and your staff.
• Grammar, punctuation & fonts, double check your spelling, grammar and fonts, keep them consistent throughout the site and make the fonts big enough to read or let your visitors listen!
• Include good, relevant text on each and every page, make sure you have text as a back up for images, this is called alternative text or “alt text”,  great for visitors and the search engines.

Technical

• Make sure your website loads quickly, on the web people are not patient, more than a couple of seconds and they will hit the back button! So not too many pictures or videos.
• Make it easily see-able on every browser, such as internet explorer, firefox, safari, opera etc.
• Ensure all the functions work, make sure all pages are consistent.
• Check your buttons, links and navigation are all working, there is nothing more frustrating than finding broken links, they really do chip away at your credibility.
• Ensure you have enough bandwidth to cope with the number of visitors you expect.
• Make sure you have some form of validation for your forms,  you don’t want the worlds craziest hackers sending you every nasty virus under the sun.
• Avoid gimmicks such as pop ups, moving boxes, loud music or animations and videos that take an age to load or run.
• Avoid frames, they are “old hat”.

C. Marketing

• Make your website sticky – add interesting content, give them freebies, don’t let them press the back button.
• Have a reason for each and every page to be there, give your visitor a “call for action”.
• Build your brand.
• Include terms and conditions, legal stuff, a sitemap and “about us” page.
• Give your visitors emotion, interest, make them smile, laugh or cry.
• Make it easy and obvious for your website visitor to contact you, include telephone contact, email contact, a real location address, build an email list, use all the tools.
• Convert your customers, measure everything, (Google analytics or web trends), especially your sales and marketing successes.

If you follow these items to the letter and you’ll be well on your way to having a killer website and delighting all who visit.

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