We all want to present our company in the best possible light, and a website can make or break that aspiration. So what does every great website have in common? We have compiled a list of the key elements that come together to make a good website great.
1. Beautiful imagery
Choosing the right logo and image is essential for a website to look professional. These days, it’s simple to locate unlimited free stock photographs; the best places to look are Unsplash and Creative Commons.
Make sure you are familiar with the various image formats; the three primary ones are .gif,.jpg, and.png. You will always need to adjust the image’s size and quality to optimise your site’s speed. Heavy imagery slows things down and leads to people losing patience due to increased page load times.
Utilise free image compression tools like compressjpeg.com before publishing images to your website. The user experience for your visitors will be enhanced, and even though the image quality is reduced, the human eye will hardly notice. Search engines adore websites that load quickly, and a lot of this is down to the size of the images you have.
2. First class copy
Always keep in mind that writing for a website differs from writing a letter or a book. We tend to be less formal online, but we also need to make it easy for those who are busy to obtain the information they need. Therefore, we must design our information in the right way.
We do this by:
- utilising a logical headline structure,
- keeping text paragraphs under a certain length,
- adding bullet points,
- and picking legible fonts.
Also crucial at this point is to keep in mind SEO best practises. You should identify at least three key search terms for which you want to appear at the top of Google, depending on the size of your website.
3. A navigation menu that makes sense and a contact page
Use a contact form rather than an email address to offer visitors to your site a professional impression. Fortunately, contact forms may easily be integrated with most platforms.
Keep in mind that visitors must be able to easily navigate from one page to another on your website. Make sure it makes sense and pay attention to it. For instance, it would be a major failure to forget to link to the contact form in the menu or page footer if your goal is for users to send you messages via the form.
Procedures for creating a website
Here is the strategy for creating a website from scratch.
- Create a mind map to organise the thoughts for your website.
- Purchase the domain.
- Select a CMS or website builder.
- Create the text and image material for each page (following SEO best practices).
- Create the analytics tools and add the content to your website.
- Promote and publish the site.
Your website is now live. What’s next?
Once your website has been developed and published, you can begin marketing and optimising it to draw in more visitors and enhance the user experience.
Refresh your website: Internet pages are not books. They may still be amended after they are published. When you have the chance, make sure to publish fresh, pertinent content, and keep the website updated. Consider the website of a restaurant as an example. Any changes to the menu should be updated as soon as feasible on the website.
You’ll need to further enhance the SEO of your website in order to draw in as many people as possible. Although not particularly difficult, this demands time and effort.
If you don’t track the visitors to your website, the efforts you made to establish yourself online will be for nothing. You can determine whether it is working or not by doing that. Google Analytics is the most common website analysing tool. It’s also free.
Naturally, you should sign up with Google Search Console after publishing your website to inform Google that your page is up and to instruct the search engine bots to access your information. Alternatively, at the very least, give Google your website’s URL (address) so that it can index it.
Email marketing is a common tactic, particularly for companies looking to keep in touch with their customers. For bloggers, small businesses, and internet retailers in particular, this is helpful.
To communicate with guests (and potential visitors) outside of the website you’ve developed, most websites also include social media profiles (such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).