Well Designed and Functional
Your site reflects your company, your products, your services, and ultimately your brand. Visual appeal, polish, and professionalism are crucial. Allow white space, uncluttered layouts with quality photographs and graphics look, and let your message shine through.
Equally important, the site must work quickly, correctly, and as expected.
Build to web standards, proofread rigorously and test regularly for problems with speed or functionality. Every page should always be fast and functional. Because many of them could be a potential customer’s first or only impression. Broken, slow, or poorly constructed areas will leave your visitors frustrated and encourage them to leave.
Easy to Use
Site visitors are always in a hurry. Don’t make them work for the information. User Experience (UX) plays a key role in helping visitors use, understand, and stay on your website. Create obvious, logical navigation with a clear hierarchy. Use consistent layouts and visual cues for functionality across the site.
Your site should satisfy both ‘searchers’—coming for something specific, and ‘browsers’—just looking. Help users accomplish their tasks quickly with onsite search. Further, keep them engaged by suggesting related content and minimizing dead ends.
Optimized for Mobile
Today there are no excuses, your site must look great and work well on any platform. The growth of mobile and tablet devices is not slowing down. In addition, you just don’t know what your next visit will be using. Optimizing for mobile will improve both the experience of your visitors and your SEO Rankings.
Fresh Quality Content
Be succinct, interesting, and new. Further, use language that makes sense to your audience—avoid jargon, corporate-speak, and acronyms. It is important to spell correctly, be accurate, be relevant, and keep your website updated on a regular basis.
Blogs and social media updates are great ways to add fresh content, it further keeps visitors returning. Yes, keeping things fresh requires a bit of investment. No, you can’t do without it.
Readily accessible contact and location
Your audience won’t chase you down. Make it easy to engage, offer multiple points of contact: phone, email, social media, and maybe an easy-to-use contact form. A Google map is a bonus. Above all, ensure that this information is readily available on an easy-to-find contact page—if not every page of your site.
Clear calls to action
If your site asks nothing of visitors, they will surely do nothing. What is the purpose of your site? Is that purpose clear to visitors? Even informational sites want visitors to read and share articles. Furter follow the company on social media, download toolkits, join mailing lists or learn more about the organization. Include an ask on each page.
Optimized for Search and the Social Web
It’s not enough to build a nice-looking website that’s easy to use. It needs to earn traffic. Otherwise, all that effort in design, UX, and content development will be for naught. There are hundreds of rules and guidelines for effective search engine optimization, so here are a few to start with:
Use page titles and meta tags on every page. Further alt tags on every image. Optimize content on your site to align with words real people search for. Use keywords appropriately in content as well as links. Use Cascading Style Sheets for layout and further keep your HTML code clutter-free.
