Ten Tips for Improving Your Website

Your website is a gold mine waiting to be found by new, potential customers. But in today’s competitive marketplace, it’s a little trickier than to just putting up a website. Even if your business isn’t based in the web, your website is an important part of your brand and requires some business strategy.

Here are ten tips for improving your website:

1. Make it mobile-friendly. With over 50% of Americans owning a smartphone, chances are that many of your clients and customers are viewing your website on their mobile browsers. Be sure to check your website on multiple mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) and see if your website is still easy to navigate and view to determine if it is mobile-friendly.

2. What’s your website goal? If your company operates completely outside of the web, your website still needs a goal. Even if your goal is as simple as getting visitors to call, make sure that goal is clear and you’ve created a strategy to achieve it. (e.g. If it is to get them to call, then be sure your phone number is listed on the main page and easy to find on all other pages.)

3. Condense your menus. Do you have sixteen submenus under one menu in your navigation bar? Then it might be time to do a little ‘spring cleaning.’ Minimizing your submenus will make your website much easier to navigate for new visitors. Plus, it will look a lot cleaner.

4. Ditch distractions. Unnecessary music and splash pages are generally more of an annoyance than a benefit, distracting visitors from what you want them to do, and leading to shorter website visits.

5. Call visitors to action. To truly put your website to work for your business, every great website should have a call to action on every page.

6. Use powerful imagery. The old saying pictures speak louder than words holds true for your website too. If you have the opportunity, hire a professional photographer to take photos of your team, your office and your latest projects. Then feature them prominently on your website.

7. Brand it. Make sure your website matches your company branding. This will create stronger brand awareness and customer recognition.

8. Video and social media. If you aren’t on social media yet, and your company doesn’t have videos, get on it! These are great for boosting website SEO, and will also help you establish a stronger brand.

9. Multiple Locations? You can improve your search engine positions by making sure all of locations are formatted with mapping information available in a search engine friendly format.

10. Create Friendly Page Names.  Does you page name look something like “…com/page1.html”?  If so, it is time to re-name all of the pages so that it is more reflective of the content. If you are selling Business Cards, a better name is “…com/business-cards.html.” Plus, it is more search engine friendly.

Come to Our Next Website Wednesday.

Get your website analyzed (for free) at our next Website Wednesday. All you have to do is make an appointment and we’ll take a keen eye to it together. If together we decide you could improve it, our experienced web design team can help either update your current one or create a new one.

We also create mobile websites!