The internet is a pretty crowded place. You may be wondering what makes a website good or bad. After all, they all look the same: they have a header, some images, and a bunch of text. How do you know which one will get your name out there? If you want your website to succeed, ensure it’s built to web standards, proofread rigorously, and regularly tested for errors. Having fast and available pages on your website is extremely important since any of these can be a potential customer’s first or even only impression of your business. A few things will make your visitors frustrated and encourage them to leave if the website is broken, slow, or poorly constructed.
It’s all about the features. You need to have the right parts for your business so that people can find you online, but also so that once they stay on your site. If they don’t stay on your site, they can’t become leads!
- Faster Load Speeds
For many people, the internet is a lifeline. It’s how they do their jobs, entertain themselves, and communicate with friends and family. But there’s one thing that could turn people off from using the internet: slow websites.
If you’re looking to build a website, you need to optimize it for speed. Handling the heavy components of your site—like videos, you need to take them out, slowing down your visitors’ experience. Not only that, but speed is also a ranking factor in search engines. If your competitor’s website is faster than yours, they’ll probably get more search traffic from their customers.
2. On-point Brand Identity
If you’re redesigning your website or even just thinking about it, you should think carefully about how you want your brand portrayed. Consider color scheme, font, the type of graphics and photos, how much content and space you’ll use, and the tone of voice and your brand’s message. These things create a cohesive identity that will subtly inform your visitor of who you are and what you do. Confusing brand identity will leave your visitors unsure of and unable to relate to your company.
Every brand has a unique identity. Whereas companies used to think that visual consistency across platforms was the most important part of branding, it is now more important than ever to create a cohesive image online. People want their experience on mobile devices, tablets, and social media sites to align with what they see in print. When you design your identity with this principle in mind, you will make it easier for yourself later on.
- Web Icon (Favicon) – When potential clients do a Google search for your product or service, they know what they’ll find if they click on your website link. When prospective clients arrive at your website, they see the favicon as the first thing on the browser tab. Use an icon that reflects or relates to your brand.
3. Great Landing Page
The goal of a landing page is to get people to take action with one particular product or service, whether for lead generation or click-through. Your landing page should be designed specifically for that purpose – getting a visitor in the door, so they can take action (like emailing a salesperson or filling out a form). It should be simple, easy to navigate, and focused on the end goal. If you’re using this page to promote a product or service, make sure it’s clear what people get when they submit their contact information. Having customer testimonials and reviews on the website will help in building trust in a business. Adding compelling, clear headlines will also enhance trust and credibility. The call to action on the page should be easy to understand.
You can also use landing pages to redirect a customer from another site, such as when they click on an ad or Google search result. A good landing page will do its job by convincing a potential customer that it’s worth it to provide personal details for whatever you have to offer—a gift card, free estimate, or contest entry/webinar registration.
4. Connect through social media channels
Social media has become a part of our daily lives. It’s in everyone’s pockets, and it allows anyone in this world an opportunity to have an audience and, therefore, a business. For those who are not familiar with social media, it is a way of interacting with others online through various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Each venue offers different features and benefits which can help you drive traffic to your website and generate sales leads from potential customers.
Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your business, but it can also help you rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). The secret is how Google looks at social signals when determining if your website deserves a higher ranking. If people talk about you on social media, Google will take note, leading to better placement in their search results.
To ensure your website gets noticed by people seeking out your products or services online, make sure it’s easy to find what they’re looking for by using keywords in your domain name and meta tags. Then start building up some positive buzz around your brand by engaging with customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
5. Mobile-Friendly
Mobile web traffic has officially surpassed desktop web traffic. In other words, people are now more likely to view your website from their phones than from their computers.
That’s why it’s so essential that your home improvement website design be mobile-friendly. If you want to keep up with the times and reach your target audience, you need to optimize your site for mobile viewers. This means using large, finger-friendly buttons and icons; an intuitive navigation system; and an easy-to-read font and letter size that can be viewed easily on a smaller screen.
But that’s not all! Google and other search engines now expect web pages to be designed specifically with mobile users in mind—and if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they won’t rank those pages highly in search results. So if you want to stay competitive in this market, you must have a mobile-friendly design for your website.
6. Good Quality Content
Create content that is catchy, meaningful, and educational. If you’re looking to create a blog post or landing page for your business, you want to make sure it’s something that people will remember—and not just because of how great it looks. You want them to remember what the message was and why they should care about it. And most importantly: you want them to take some kind of action. So how do you do that? Create content that is catchy, meaningful, and educational.
It’s true: search engines look for well-written, keyword-rich content on every page of your website. Creating content that is scannable, easy to understand, and always has headings and bullet points is the key to creating content that will get shared.
To make your content more scannable:
- Use subheadings to break up long sections of text.
- Use bold text or italics for important sections of text.
- Use bullet points whenever possible to break up a large amount of information into manageable chunks.
- Include benefits for readers in your content wherever possible. This can be done by highlighting the benefits of a service or giving readers the information they need to decide about buying something.
- Include educational information in order to help readers understand concepts better or learn something new about a topic they may not know much about yet.
7. Research-Driven SEO
By creating high-quality content for all of your web pages, you create a site that people love returning to. Traffic to your site will increase, and your search engine ranking will improve. The content on a site should be easy to read, high in quality, and regularly updated by search engines. Those that don’t often show up lower on SERPs and are typically listed beneath the top 10 results. There is more to it than just having pages- service listings, pricing, historical information, or testimonials. This is about making those pages the best they can be. In other words, you need to think about what you’re putting out there and think about how people will read it. The best content is easy to scan and understand and always has headings and bullet points. Content copies should have lots of benefits for readers and have educational information.
Your search engine optimization (SEO) may be negatively affected if your site doesn’t have any content or has poor-quality content. To reach the people you need, you need to rank high in the search results. The search engine giant has been warning web admins about the importance of quality content for some time now. The search engine giant has said that only sites that provide a high-quality user experience will rank well in their search results. Thus, it’s imperative to create content with enough depth and value to keep your site full of quality, relevant, and up-to-date content.
8. Easy to Navigate
A good user experience is characterized by excellent navigation, which means that users should be able to get where they want without spending too much time trying to figure out how to do so.
- Call to Action – the CTA should be located where users expect it to be (usually at the top of the page). If you have multiple CTAs on one page, make sure they’re all visible and accessible for people to see when they arrive at your site.
- Sidebar is one of the first things that catches visitors’ eyes when accessing a page. It can be used as an extension of an article or as a separate area for marketing purposes. It should be easy to understand and navigate, so avoid using too many elements or fonts that aren’t readable. Ensure that there is enough space between each component so they don’t overlap when someone scrolls down.
9. Website Security
If you have a website, you need to protect it from hackers as much as possible. If you don’t protect your site, you could lose everything—including your business. The first thing you can do to secure your site is use HTTPS on all pages. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP. All communication between your computer and the webserver is encrypted to protect against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Once this is enabled, visitors will see a padlock icon next to the URL in their browser’s address bar.
This checklist is meant to be a starting point for anyone who wants to create a professional website. It’s not comprehensive, and it’s not meant as an exhaustive list of everything that could go wrong with your site. Instead, it’s a set of guidelines for creating a website that will help your business succeed and appeal to your audience.
