Every brand and business in today’s world should have a website. Your website is simultaneously the first source of product or service information your customers and clients turn to and a platform for them to communicate with you and give feedback. A poorly built and ineffective website is a major turn-off for most people, so you want to make your first impression count.
While the process of website building is quite straightforward, there are a lot of factors that influence how successful your website will be. And it is very important to consider these factors before writing a single line of code or filling up a template, as the case may be. Here are five tips to know when building your business website:
1. Security is Key
Security is the most important element of a good website. From the moment you launch your site, hackers and other malicious parties are trying to wreak havoc by stealing sensitive information from your clients, crashing your servers, and generally ruining the user experience. You should have precautions against this such as:
- Password salting and hashing
- Secure administrator passwords
- Spam bot detection and blocking
- Hotlink protection
- Up-to-date site backups
By far the simplest and most effective security measure you can install on your website is an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is a digital document that encrypts communications between your website visitors and your server. This makes it impossible to intercept information as it is transmitted over the network, and also elevates your site from plain HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol that is preferred by modern browsers.
2. Make Your Site Informative
If you sell products or services online, you want to keep visitors on your site for as long as possible. A straightforward way to do this is by giving them what they want: value. This will increase the chances that they stay and actually buy something from you.
First, tell them exactly what you offer, and why you are better than your competitors. You want to showcase your uniqueness in a creative way so that visitors don’t get bored and leave. Many larger businesses do this by publishing company blogs and informational articles, or by giving away free ebooks and guides. Also Read – How Instagram Has Changed Social Media
3. Avoid Clutter
Too often, website owners make the mistake of stuffing their website with too much content, thus making it slow to load and unfriendly to visitors. You should display relevant information prominently on your site so that users can find what they’re looking for easily.
Site navigation features can make or break your website, so it’s essential you get it right. Similar info pages should be grouped under a single link, such as About or News, and always ensure there is an easy way to contact your business. A good way to do this is by using a website footer containing the essential links, and an email contact form.
4. SEO Matters
Your website can also be a major source of organic growth for your business if you make it search-engine friendly. The Google algorithm is mostly a mystery, but there are a few general principles you can use to make your site rank higher.
Utilize popular search keywords in your blog posts and titles, and make sure your content is formatted properly so important information stands out. Also, include a robots.txt file that guides web crawlers and indexers to the important parts of your site and excludes the less valuable content.
5. Make Your Site Mobile-friendly
More and more people around the world are adopting smartphones as their primary Internet-enabled device, so it makes sense to ensure that your site looks and works well on small screens. This is termed responsive design, and it’s crucial if you’re trying to gain visitors and customers. Fonts should scale up or down as necessary, images should resize, and the overall aesthetic of your website shouldn’t change too much when viewed on a smartphone.
A good website developer is a lifesaver here, so make sure you hire the right person for the job.
The Value of a Good Website
A good website is a composition of beauty, value, and functionality: beauty for aesthetic appeal to draw in visitors, value to keep them on the pages, and functionality to make it as easy as possible for them to carry out actions on your website. With a proper balance of these three elements, you’ll have a piece of digital real estate that will market your business efficiently. Happy building!
