Do ever you wonder about how much business you lose simply because of a bad first impression? Or how much your website influences a new customer’s perspective of your company. Afterall, your website is quite often your business’s first impression to your market. Updating your website is a necessity and opportunity to show off your best features and talents.
It can be an intimidating decision, but improving the performance and applying a modern look is time well spent. It also requires resources like imagination, team collaboration and time to produce a quality website, even if it’s only a revamp.
Here are some factors to consider when updating your website:
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Start with your BUSINESS goals - What business objective will your website produce? If it’s lead generation, then it should be strategically designed around lead generation techniques.
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Best practice SEO - Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they will come. You need to be findable. This includes ensuring your website is well coded for search engines and W3C compliant. You can instantly check your website’s W3C compliancey status here: validator.w3.org
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Simplicity - Whether you’re going for visually stunning or a completely practical design, an easy to navigate and seamlessly intuitive design is a must.
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Accessibility - Visitors will be coming to your website on all different kinds of devices, including smartphones. Ensure you have a mobile friendly website, otherwise you will be losing business simply because they couldn’t view your website effectively.
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Quality content - Your content should engage and fulfill the needs of your visitors. It must add value to the visitor, otherwise it’s just noise on the page.
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Track visitors - Many websites have Google Analytics (website traffic analytics software) on their websites. Not so many website administrators actually review traffic analytics regularly. Your analytics provides a ton of insight to how you can improve your websites performance, and at the end of the day, make more money.
Sounds easy right, or did that just intimidate you further? Either way, don’t procrastinate on it. Every day that your website is not performing as well as it could be, is another day that you’re losing business as a result.
