It’s amazing to think that it wasn’t all that long ago that having a website for your business was considered something of a luxury. A couple of decades ago websites were reserved for advanced tech businesses and those with a budget large enough to accommodate them. However, thanks to the rise of the internet the idea of having a business in the twenty-first century without a website is genuinely shocking for a lot of people. The reality is that if your business doesn’t’ have a website, then it might as well not exist at all in the eyes of many customers. However, that doesn’t mean that just having a website will magically make your business successful overnight. Plenty of great businesses have found themselves either unable to reach their full potential or failing entirely simply because they only put the minimum amount of effort into their website. To prevent you from falling into that same trap, here are some things that you can do in order to take your website to the next level.
Design
What’s the first thing that your customers are going to notice when they go to your website? Is it the content? The history of your company? Of course not! The first thing that customers are going to notice is the way that your website looks. Far too many promising businesses have shot themselves in the foot by having a website which looks dated, ugly, and amateurish. Even if you have the greatest business in the world with the most forward thinking product on the market, a badly designed website is going to reflect very poorly on your business as a whole. If your website looks amateurish, then customers are going to naturally assume that the rest of your business is just as amateurish and will be much less inclined to give it a chance. The best thing to do is to look carefully at the kinds of businesses that are very successful in the modern era. Ask yourself, what do they have in common? Generally speaking, their websites will be simple and elegantly designed, not worrying about flashy graphics or gimmicks and focusing instead on being able to offer the customers a simple and direct experience. Think about a company like Apple. Their entire aesthetic is built around this idea, and their website sums it up perfectly. Sure, it might sound a little bit shallow but doing this really will make customers feel more likely to trust in your business as a whole.
SEO
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Of course, it won’t matter how good your website looks if customers can’t actually find it. For the longest time, marketing was something that was done in “the real world” through TV, billboards, and newspaper ads. However, these days the vast majority of customers find new businesses online. After all, if you need to find a business of any kind, what’s the first thing that you do? You get onto Google and search for it there. This means that if your website isn’t well optimized, then you’re never going to get the kind of traffic that you really need. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the method through which you make sure that your website is always at the top of the search results on sites like Google. There are simple ways to do this through the content of your website, but you can also do it through the design of the site itself. This is something that is often incredibly complicated, and you might be better off outsourcing it to someone else. Companies like Digitalico can be incredibly useful to your business in this regard. Visit the site https://digitalico.com/ for further info and to see what kinds of things that they can offer you. SEO might seem like overly complicated and like something you’d rather not think about, but it’s simply too important for you to ignore.
Functionality
A great looking website with high volumes of traffic is wonderful, but it’s all for nothing if the thing doesn’t actually work. This is an especially big problem for small businesses who suddenly find themselves with some kind of significant spike in traffic all of a sudden. When that happens, they often find that their site simply isn’t equipped to deal with such large volumes of people. The website ends up slowing down and potentially even crashing. You need to speak to whoever it is that has designed your site to make sure that it’s properly optimized to be able to handle that level of traffic and pressure. Of course, even if a site is perfectly comfortable handling the kind of traffic that you ideally want, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be especially functional or user-friendly. The last thing you want is for people to come to your website and then abandon it soon after because using it is such a frustrating experience. The first way to solve this problem comes back to your website’s design. Make sure that it’s as simple as possible. Sure, bold graphics and animations might have been novel ten years ago, but now customers aren’t impressed by them, and they simply want a website that they can easily navigate. Simplify everything you can with your website, that way it will run more efficiently and will be much easier to understand.
Connection to your social media
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Since it started to gain serious popularity a decade ago, there have been people who insist that social media is nothing more than a fad and people will lose interest in it very quickly. It’s become increasingly clear over time that this simply isn’t the case. Social media is here to stay, and it’s a new and exciting way in which you can connect and engage with your customers. However, you’re not going to be able to do that if they don’t know how to find your social media pages. Since your website is often the first place people go, you should treat it as some kind of central hub that links off to all of the other places where you have a presence online. Make sure that, whatever page they are on, they can easily find your social media pages with a single click.
Your blog
If your website doesn’t have a blog, then you’re not using your website properly. If you really want customers to connect to your business, then you need to be able to give them a peek behind the curtain. A blog allows you to show people the human element behind the business which is a fantastic way to get people emotionally engaged with it. Make sure that your blog is easily found on your website and that it is regularly updated with high quality, well-written content that has well-integrated SEO. After all, any content that you produce is not only a method of customer engagement, but it’s also yet another way in which you can market your business.
Now, it’s important to remember that your website isn’t the only thing in your business that’s important. It is, of course, just one part of the greater whole. However, in the modern, massively interconnected world, if you’re not taking the time and resources to really get the most out of your website then you’re doing your business a genuine disservice. You’re going to make it that much harder for yourself to reach customers, market yourself, and to let the world know what it is that you actually have to offer. While it shouldn’t be the only thing that you concentrate on, you need to make sure that you’re putting the right amount of effort into your business’s website at all times.
