Whether you choose to have your website made by a professional designer or you want to try your hand at doing it yourself, there are a few things to keep in mind while you are performing this most important step for your business.
- Choose your domain name carefully
You want a name that is short, catchy and easy to spell for your domain. Don’t go for exact keyword match domain names, but rather try to find a brand name. if the brand name is too long, try to find an abbreviation. For instance, the Internet Movie Database is imdb.com.
- Make a navigation plan for the site
Before you begin, you should know where you want to go with the website and what the main pages will be. If your website is not well planned out, you might find that your customers are having trouble finding the content you think is important. Organize the pages according to importance and try to create a main menu with well organized parent and child elements, that preferably fits into a single line on most devices.
- Avoid dead ends
This tip is connected to the one above. All pages should be interconnected not only in the main navigation, but also through linking from anchor words, related posts, call to action buttons etc. Avoid at all costs having pages that are the end of the line, not linked to other content on the site. Your users should be able to easily navigate from any page on the website.
- Keep SEO in mind
As you’re writing, think about not only what your readers would like, but also what your goals are in terms of keywords. You should have a set of keywords to use for SEO purposes as you are writing. Of course, more advanced SEO will require some research and you may want to get back on that matter again after the first version of the website is done. But still, keep some of your attention on the keyword plan from the beginning.
- Choose a responsive template
Nowadays, most CMS for web building (WordPress, Wix, Joomla) automatically offers responsive templates, but you should still check that your website template looks good on any device, especially on mobiles.
- Choose a coherent color palette and font families
In order to keep things tidy and coherent, stick to a color palette based on no more than two main colors. Also, choose one or two fonts for your text. More than that would be confusing for your readers.
- Have plenty of content, but avoid large chunks of text
Thin content doesn’t look good, neither to users, nor to search engines. This is why you should keep your word count per page to at least 400-500 words. Yet, try to break up that text into sections, bulleted lists etc., in order to enable your users to quickly read through with ease.
- Use free resources
There are plenty of free templates, plugins and icons that will help your website look friendlier and more professional. Use them as much as you can.
- Don’t forget your contact info and connections to social media
The contact details should be under a page titled „contact” or „contact us”. This is how both users and search engines easily find this information about your business. Make it easy for users to visit your social media profiles, like or share your content directly from your websites. There are plugins for that.
- Track your users
The thing that will tell you whether your users are responding well to your website or not is the data about their on-site behavior. For this kind of data you should create a Google Analytics account. It will tell you exactly how your audience found the website, where did they click and how much time they spent on your content as well as which part of your content is the most popular. Based on what you find here, you will know how to proceed and what changes need to be made.
If you need help developing your website, Akby Digital Marketing has a team of web designers at your disposal.
