15 Fundamentals For A Successful Website
A website is an essential part of running a successful business; it’s more than ever a key decision when starting up. Any business that wants to capture its target customers must not only have a website but must do so with an impressive design to reach the market, gain acceptance and enjoy a good competitive edge. A well planned and professional website is a great business tool that can deliver excellent ROI and marketing outcome to save you time and money on unproductive marketing and compliment your business strategy. We will be discussing the top 14 fundamentals that work magic and produce desired outcomes for a successful business website.
1. START WITH A STRATEGY
The first reason why businesses fail to reap the benefits of building a website is the lack of strategy that serve as the blueprint for the project execution. It’s like building a house without a building plan. No matter how beautiful the architecture or expensive the interior decor you want to have inside will be, the result will be unimaginably poor – a big fail.
A successful website start with clearly defined goals and business objectives, every other decision is guided by the blueprint – a holy scripture of sort. Create a list of your expected outcomes; let your end goal determine your starting and kick-off point. Answer all the important questions – the what, why, how, whom, where and when – this will be your guiding compass. Describe and profile your target audience and how you intend to engage your visitor – include a clear map for buyer’s journey to create valuable information that encourages visitor’s action.
It’s ultimately important to build and focus your website strategy on the audience – make sure your copy, messaging, aesthetics and features are well planned to appeal and connect with your target audience. It’s the first step to a successful marketing of your website and business. Agree with your design agency on outcomes and highlight the deliverable and key millstones.
2. CREATE A PERFECT LANDING PAGE
On the average, website visitors spent about 7 seconds to go through 90% of website they visit. Simply put, you have to make your first impression and impact within these few seconds – telling the visitor: what you do, who you serve, how you do it and why they should choose doing business with you.
Therefore, it’ important for any business willing to succeed online to capture the mind (deliver it’s pitch) and connect with the visitor right from arrival point that is your landing page – also called the home page. Business should invest time and resources into developing a clear marketing message with all corresponding, accompanying and relevant elements such as logo, tagline or slogan. This also includes punch lines to reflect and communicate in specifics: the brand’s credibility, expertise and target audience or market you serve.
Have a clear strategy for your website copy to deliver compelling and brief introduction of your business in a way the customers and visitors will appreciate and desire to meet you – as I said earlier in a very short time, preferably less than 7 seconds.
3. USE CALL TO ACTIONS
A lot of website experience drought especially when there is no careful planning going into the design process – the graveyard silence is can be very disruptive to business aspirations. Many business owners thus keep wondering and start asking why their website isn’t sending business their way. It simply lack of conversion optimization or strategy.
Conversion optimization and strategy cleverly encourage your site visitors to take action – cautiously planned to invite and guide your visitors on next steps through the buying process – suggesting and ensuring that they make decision favorable or initiate a contact with you. Conversion is achievable through smart design elements called call-to-action buttons e.g. “Shop Now”, “Click Here” or value-led action calls/CTA’s by offering specific information or details the customers will find valuable to build trust and initiate commitment.
This is also important to ease and anticipate the customer experience journey through your website. Key outcome of a well planned conversion strategy includes increase lead generation to fill up your sales pipeline, business appointment, product order or service booking. So it’s important to have such simple details like your business phone number, address, and contact email in visible and easy-to-spot locations on your website.
4. TRACK YOUR CONVERSIONS
This part is very crucial if you desire to see and experience the real value of a website to your business. It’s easy to measure your website ROI, simply by tracking the numbers of inquiries and leads; sales and conversion coming from the website. It will help you determine the source of your website traffic and visitors to know where to concentrate your marketing efforts and ad budget plus what it’s costing your business to get a customer online. This information will help you plan your marketing budget, measure effectiveness of your method and evaluate the success of your overall strategy in terms of your website goals, online marketing improvements and changes. Good website solutions usually include tools to help you track your conversions and analyze the data for business intelligence.
5. MAKE YOUR “ABOUT US” PAGE CAPTIVATING
Have you ever talked to a lady before and then go on and on talking about yourself? I’m sure that’s not something cool and if you are a lady – you don’t enjoy such experience if you had one before. Same thumb rule applies to website about us pages; it’s not all about you. Create a balance between sharing information about the personality of your brand or business and how you help your make customer’s life better.
The about us page like your landing home page is one of your impulse pages, it should captivate your audience and help them see how your company mission and values delivers benefits for your customers – it’s good to be direct and specific so that you can get your visitors attention. Spend some time and money to create professional copy for a good show online.
6. CREATE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT
On the web, content is king! Content is what visitor look for online before a beautiful website or great product. To grow your business online, you need to tell a great story first – you can’t get a good result without a great content. Great contents are magnet for leads and traffic and very key to a successful marketing effort, customer interactions and engagement, and solution presentation. You should focus on providing qualitative, valuable and educating masterpiece content for your website and email marketing – ensure your contents are readable, precise and appropriate to the interest of your target audience. A combination of well planned appealing content and email marketing is a perfect tool for leading and helping your visitors towards reaching an informed buying decision. It demonstrates your authority, expertise and experience which are three jewels to earn customer trust and loyalty.
7. BUILD VISUALLY IMPRESSIVE DESIGN
A visually appealing site with great aesthetics gives visitors déjà vu and keeps them glued. It’s creates seamless, unique, scintillating and compelling experience that gives your visitors excitement. A successful blend of creative visuals and functional design will help:
- Keep visitor engaged with your website and stays longer
- Makes your website memorable which in turn makes visitors return,
- Connect with your visitor’s emotional response, making them likely to refer others to your site.
- Establish your product and service, brand and business as a top quality.
Working with a professional web design agency can help you achieve a unique creative design and a great ROI as highlighted above.
8. INTUITIVE USER EXPERIENCE
User experience comes second to none in making your website successful online, never trade it for anything! User experience is the creative blend of visual design and functionality to deliver intuitive and usability on the website to your audience. So you have no choice really than to build your website around user experience. It will help you effectively drive user interaction, engagement and conversion as well as anticipate the choices they will make even before they realize it – this will give your visitors a sense of personal connection. This can be achieved by anticipating what brings visitor to your site, how your audience will like to interact with your site and why they are coming to your website – once you identify these needs, you can structure the design of your website to fulfill those needs. Meeting the audience’s point of needs will ultimately position you as the go to business and brand of choice. To achieve high user experience, give easy access to content, contact information, product details and pricing information – make it available and on-demand.
9. DESIGN FOR MOBILE EXPERIENCE
One out of every four internet users uses a Smartphone or mobile device to access information online. This means you can’t afford to have a website that render well on desktops and laptops only but performs poorly on mobile devices. In today’s business eco system, mobile rules! You have low chances of being found or considered on Google search if your website is not adaptable to mobile device viewing and enhanced for small screens. As a matter of fact, it has to be mobile responsive – fit for purpose on small screen devices. It mean the design presentation, content layout and functional features has to be planned and delivered in the most enhanced version and effective way for different screen sizes as well as modes: portrait or landscape layouts.
In simple websites adapting the content and design, making them responsive will suffice. But for larger and complex sites you will need to further adapt your functionalities and make it suitable for good mobile user experience, usually this requires a separate mobile version of your website to meet this requirement. It’s important to let you know that more online buyers make their purchase through a mobile device, so it’s not an optional features rather a must have.
10. BUILD ON CMS PLATFORMS
Web design service has evolved over the years from simple html to more robust, feature rich CMS and eCommerce platforms which help you to deliver enhanced usability, efficient user interaction, search engine optimization and easy content management. With the right platform, the overall performance, stability and scalability of your website are guaranteed.
You will save time on content publishing, less effort on search engine optimization and less experience with finding and fixing bugs on your website. Most CMS platforms also demonstrate strong defense against website hacking and attacks. Key point to consider when choosing a CMS platform includes size of user community, ease of content editing, portability, search engine readiness and site load times. Your web design agency should be able to guide you on the best fit platform for your project requirements.
11. PLAN YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY
Doing business online without any doubt is a treasure hunt opportunity and every business should strive to find the sweet spot and get on-board. However, business owners must understand that the battle to win the game and get customer’s attention goes beyond just having a beautiful website. You have to develop and experiment different strategies to discover the most effective approach to reach your target audience. This include planning how to push your content out there in order to attract the right traffic from multiple channels such as search engines, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, SEO search engine optimization and social media – this will in turn generate leads and sales conversion for the business.
12. OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINES
Working out your site visibility on search engine is a critical step towards making your online presence profitable and rewarding. It’s a continuous process that requires dedicated resources and tactical optimization to ensure your target audience can seek you out when searching for products or services you provide. SEO helps search engines to find, profile and archive your website using keyword that are associated with your industry and what you do.
This in turn makes you readily available when customers search for information about what a service you provide or a product you are selling. Simple search engine optimization involves using keyword in your copy, presenting your important messages in text format rather than including them as part of an images or animation, including title, description and keyword Meta tags on your pages. For more comprehensive SEO you may require the services of an expert to work with you in achieving your business goals.
13. GO SOCIAL MEDIA
Truth is you don’t have to like social media, to grow social in business today – it’s not an option anymore it’s a must – you just have to be social. Social media is a good source for attracting traffic to your website and pushing your content out to your target audience in a way that no amount of marketing and advertising can achieve. Ensure that all your important content pages have the social sharing feature to make it easy for site visitors who find your content interesting to help you share and spread. But beyond this, a social business is the choice of modern day customers.
A social media presence will afford your business the opportunity to interact more with prospect and showcase your great customer service, products and service beforehand. This gives you an edge and help you leverage the social media channels to imprint your brand value as an industry leader and trusted choice partner for your industry service – on your target audience’s mind and turn them into ambassadors. It’s important to note that social media is free and affordable when compare to the traditional marketing tools and channels – it’s very rewarding with high ROI.
14. START BLOGGING
Everyone is familiar with blogging this days, you’ve heard about Linda Ikeji, Bella Naija, Olori Super Gal OSG, Omojuwa and a host of others. But still don’t understand why a business should be blogging, well too bad you have no choice. We live in a knowledge sharing world and it’s a key success metrics for your online presence. Start blogging to educate the visitors about your business, company information, press releases, relevant happenings and new developments in your industry, your products, services and solutions or industry specific events.
A corporate or business blog is a good platform for your customers to interact with one another and share knowledge – in all it helps you build a growing community of brand influencers who will be happy to evangelize about your business to other prospective customers out there. Remember no marketing systems works better like a word-of-mouth referral. A well authored blog over time turns into a repository of valuable content and can become a value-paying digital asset with highly rewarding windfall such as enjoying high organic (direct) traffic from search engines and back-links form other sourcing and content delivery websites.
15. WORK WITH A WEB DESIGN AGENCY (TEAM)
Web design is one of the most proliferated business practice world over and there is really nothing bad about it. However, there is the gap of several run-of-the-mill designers doing it as a side fling. These guys don’t subscribe to any professional rules or ethics, they are the ones you call anything goes. You know why? This is so because it’s far too easy to get a free web template somewhere online and put your name, logo and information on it and call it a website.
First rule for a successful site is never run a business website on free web template or hosting etc. In the immediate short term it might proof cheap but it cost more to you on the long term, that puts your business at greater risk than you can imagine. If you are not ready then don’t go the cheap route, good things don’t come cheap you know! Work with a web design team that is willing to partner with you to achieve your business goals for the website.
It pays to invest in working with a professional and quality web design team than a roadside designer because it saves you time and resources in the short-term and money in the long-term as well as help you deliver on your strategic business goals. Choosing a good web designer or a design agency can be a daunting task but there are few things you should look out for beyond the proposal and quote.
- Review their portfolio of past projects to get insight about their experience and craft.
- Ask questions about how much or what value existing clients are getting from past projects.
Don’t make your project a one-off; it’s bad for your business. Be willing to pay a little premium to maintain a partnership that will make your website a successful one and grow your business. If your business grows, you make more money and it’s won’t be a bad thing sharing a part of that to keep your winning team together.
The journey to make your website effective and showcase your brand’s visibility to extend your business outreach is not a one-time event; you have to commit a lot of resources – time, strategy and dedication to achieve the overall goal of consistently appealing to your online audience. A brilliant, smart looking, informative, usable, accessible and discoverable website is key to a successful business online.
If you will like to launch a website project that meets the recommendations above yet affordable for your budget send us a mail at hello@websmithng.com or click here to sign up for our pay as you go website plans.