How long have you been in business? Do you have enough customer coverage? Is your customer base constantly increasing? What sets you apart from your competitors?
These are some valid questions for any business, be it a start-up or a fully established company.
With changes in the framework within which modern businesses operate, today’s competitive landscape is no longer limited to the traditional brick-and-mortar concept. Every organization needs to have a virtual presence. Virtual presence through a website helps not only in e-commerce but serves various secondary and tertiary objectives of the business. Business development through new customers and customer acquisition, CRM, reputation management, opinion building, image management, brand building are some of the roles that a website can play.
A well-functioning website attracts traffic and helps retain it. A good website should ensure that people not only return to it, but also recommend it to others.
What do we understand by a website that works well? What are some of the criteria of a great website? What can make a website work well?
Beauty and Design
First impressions are visual in nature. Customers can like or dislike something in seconds, simply because of how it looks. It especially applies to websites. It all starts with beauty, design and clarity. A beautifully designed website can be a monetarily effective mechanism to improve traffic to a website and increase lead generation. Conversely, a poorly designed website encourages the user to leave the page even before it fully loads. This can result in loss of business potential.
design compatibility
With the increased penetration of mobile technology, more and more users are accessing websites through their smartphones and tablets. Website performance is no longer limited to the desktop.
The responsiveness and compatibility of a design with respect to a large number of physical devices defines the design capacity of a website. If a business doesn’t provide a mobile-friendly website to its customers, it’s falling behind its competitors. To keep up with the times, most of the well established companies have beautifully crafted, clear and responsive mobile friendly website designs.
User Behavior Analysis
It is recommended to pay attention to the performance of the site through regular monitoring and review. To improve user engagement, it is essential to use Google Analytics on a regular basis to analyze user behavior.
This involves studying the browsing pattern and customer actions on various pages of the site. Working with visitor data gives an idea of what site users like. Website heatmaps can be generated through various tools that provide data on clicks.
What do they do and what pages are left unattended? Do the blog and content pages have acceptable readability? Are the objectives of establishing a website in line with the objective of the visitor? Such questions help improve and re-engage visitors.
clear communication
Users visiting a website have various levels of attention. To meet different levels of interest, it’s important to communicate in a way that captures and holds the interest of users. The use of appropriate fonts, understandable content and the combination of graphics, images and text makes communication more effective.
Instead of running around the topic, the right messages need to be communicated quickly and creatively. Instead of using superfluous language full of self-praise, the content should have genuine solutions to questions a visitor might have.
For example, a restaurant website should offer, very clearly, what a visitor might be looking for on your website. Menu list, feasible hours, location, weekly and daily specials, promotional coupons, online ordering, and catering links should be displayed as the first display option. You must clearly display your mobile app (if available) to download and allow users to conveniently place orders.
content is king
A website with the same old look creates monotony and reduces return frequency. People don’t want to see the same content over and over again. The freshness of the content is what any visitor craves for, which requires updating the home page and other landing pages with fresh content.
For example, any website design and software development business has little room for regular variability in design. These companies strive to update content through new and up-to-date blogs, articles, and industry insights. Its products and services home page regularly adds more information about recent developments in the company’s engineering and development process. Graphics and images are updated on the home page as well as layered landing pages to add freshness to the website. Big or small changes are added to the website to capture the interest of the user.
Multiple social plugins allow site visitors to share content, which not only optimizes the website for search engines, but also acts as a marketing messenger for the business.
Categorized landing pages
Boosting the visitor to other layered pages adds more economic value. It is difficult to display all the options on the home page. Each website has variable categories that offer different selling options.
Offers should be categorized separately with different landing pages, directing the user to that specific category. Each landing page should have clear contact and call-to-action buttons.
Taking into account the basic issues improves the performance of a website and positions a company strongly in a virtual space. To be in your main category: create a beautiful and user-friendly website, analyze user behavior, update regularly and share content. Follow these guidelines and you will be sure to be one of the best players online.