Building a website for the first time can prove to be a fairly daunting task. A business website will have its own set of requirements, and there are tons of different tools and services that you can use when building your site.
A big part of a company’s reputation is affected by its website, and it’s for this reason why you’d want it to function optimally, have the best design, performance and usability, to ensure your customers are left feeling satisfied with their experience. Remote developer hiring allows businesses to access a wider pool of web design talent, regardless of location. Neglecting just one of these factors could have a detrimental effect on your website. It could mean potential customers leaving your website for your competitors, adversely affecting your bottom line.
However, there are many questions that you will need answered, before you can begin. Are you going for a website that is content focused, or are you looking for a simple landing page with links? Do you prefer a website that’s simple, or are you more interested in a busy, informative site? And the most important question is, what is your budget for the site?
Below we’ve put together 8 tips that are very important when building a site, whether for the first or second time. The things you’ll want to consider for your site, if you want to get the most out of it.
1. Consistency
Make sure your website’s design is consistent. The types of things for you to consider are font size, font family, paragraphs, headings, image styles, content and colours. You don’t want there to be any discrepancies between site pages. When it comes to layout, the only page that can be slightly different from the others, is your landing page, but all your other pages should all be consistent, with the same general structure.
2. Go with a Mobile Responsive Site
If you want to get the most out of your website, you’ll want to ensure it is mobile responsive. A large number of people spend a considerable amount of time on their mobile phone these days, with a substantial number of these individuals opting to shop online through their mobile devices. Web design is an essential part of digital marketing, as it helps to create a positive user experience and attract and retain customers. For this reason you want your site to also be accessible on their mobile devices, you also want to ensure it offers a great user experience.
If a potential customer was to land on your website, but find it difficult to navigate through or read its text, on their mobile device, most users would simply leave the site for your competitors. Additionally, a website that is not mobile friendly will have an adverse effect on its rankings, decreasing your site’s visibility in the major search engines like Google.
3. Keep Your Site Pages Uncluttered
One important aspect of creating your own site is self-awareness. A reader needs to be able to put the information on your site in context. If you have too much information on your site, it will overload them, making it difficult for them to retain any of the information. For this reason you want to strike a balance between your images and text, on each page.
One way that you can keep things simple is by removing social widgets, like Twitter feeds. You should always be asking yourself whether or not the elements you add to your site are useful. Do they provide the user with something that adds value, does the viewer actually care about it. If the answer is no, then you should remove it.
4. Readability
In addition to going with a site that is simplistic in design, you also want to ensure it’s actually readable. One mistake many designers make is to structure their sites like a large showpiece, including massive background images and text plastered over it. This makes it difficult to read and in many cases makes the site look rather messy. One work around is simply to add an overlay using CSS or to make the image darker. You don’t want your paragraphs to be too small, and you want to go with a suitable line height, so that it doesn’t feel all bunched together. Spacing is another factor to consider. Keep your padding and margin between the elements on the page.
5. Simple Navigation
A user must be able to get around your site, so that they can find whatever it is they are looking for. To help them do this, you want to go with a simple navigation that will ensure they stay on your site as opposed to going elsewhere. You could position your navigation at the top of your page, or at the side, if you have a blog. Whichever you go with, you want it to be user friendly, this means, it’s consistent with all the elements a user would expect.
6. Call to Action
Every page on your site should have something about it that entices the reader to do a specific action. In other words, you should have a call to action. These landing pages will, in one way or the other, encourage the user to carry out a specific action, such as sign up to a service, phone your company, purchase a product, and download a whitepaper or something else that is beneficial to them and your company. Make sure the call to action is clear, which means, consider adding a link, button or something else that is easily understood. You should also consider positioning it above the fold, so that users don’t have to scroll down the site to find it.
7. Pick a Good Domain Name
One of the most important aspects of a web address is its domain name. As an example, https://www.domainname.com – in this example, the domain name is “domainname”, and is the most important element of your site.
You want your domain name to be something a visitor can communicate to someone else, which means, make it simple to spell and pronounce, and avoid slang and punctuation. If you can, go for a “.com” domain suffix, as they tend to carry more prestige and are better known, as opposed to “.co” and “.net”.
If you have ambitions of expanding your business in the future, then it may be best that you don’t include any product names in the domain. For example, if you had a store that sells refrigerators in London, using LondonHomeAppliances.com will allow you to sell other products down the line, while using LondonRefrigerators.com will limit you to just that.
8. Choose Your Keywords
Backlinks and mobile optimisation are two factors that are included in search engine optimisation (SEO). But, the most important aspect of SEO is without a doubt your keywords, which includes phrases and terms, SEO tags, and search volume. When you decide to include them in the content of your page, it will help drive traffic to your site.
It’s much easier to rank for long tail keywords, such as “cheap bikes in Barcelona”, than it is to rank on very competitive keywords like “bike”. The amount of views you will receive may be substantially smaller, but the people that arrive on your site are more likely to be interested in what you’re selling.
Author’s Bio:
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.
