Create a Website Your Customers Will 'Like' and Love

More Than Just Looks!

Here at Webstix, we use the tag line: "Look Good." We say that because it can apply to many things:

• Your website should look good.
• Your company should look good.
• Your website should look good on search results pages.
• Your website should look good on various devices and web browsers.
• Your marketing should look good.
• Your return on investment should look good.
• and so on.

To have good design, you need attention to detail and experts working on your website. It has to look good in the code so that it runs well, so that people see it and so they know what to do when they get to it.

Websites Aren't Simple Anymore

Just in the last few years, the skills and expertise it takes to create an effective website have gone up exponentially. Not only is getting a website to rank in search results more complicated but look at how many kinds of devices there are out there now to view your website on. In the next year, there's a good chance that more people will view your website on a tablet or smart phone rather than on a desktop or laptop computer.

Not only that, many of our clients want their websites to be a tool. They want their websites to be the main place their customers and potential customers go for information. This requires logins, accounts, databases and more. For all that to work well on many kinds of devices means a lot of testing. It also means staying on top of the new technologies out there with continual research and development. One-man type web shops simply cannot do that any more and they're going out of business.

Steps to Create a Website That Your Website Visitors Will Love

Building a successful website takes good planning. If you're building a house, you're going to want to know how many rooms, how big and how many stories it should be. The same goes for a website. The more planning you do, the better but the main thing to do is make sure your website takes care of what your customers are looking for.

Here's a good article that's worth looking at. I've listed their steps below:

5 Steps to Create a Website That Both Your Customers & Search Engines Will Love (searchenginewatch.com)

• Step 1: Understand Your Customer
• Step 2: Don’t Attempt to Create a Work of Art
• Step 3: Create Purposeful, Well-Written Content
• Step 4: Provide Easy-to-Use Navigation
• Step 5: Measure & Improve

Some things you generally always want to include on a business website are:

• A blog - This is an easy way to add new content easily and it can have categories for news, events, announcements and more. It's meant to be a little casual, so the content can vary and you don't need to be a seasoned writer to post something. A blog will automatically list the latest (newest) items first, move the other items down and arvhive older content. They're great. For your website to grow and be a resource, you should be blogging at least once a week.
• A home page slide show - Let's face it, like in real estate, space is precious. There isn't any more land being made and screen sizes are limited, too. A home page slide show helps you tell a story or show all your services right away. A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
• Calls to action - You need links on the home page and on every inside page that ask your website visitors to do something.
• Clear navigation - The navigation should make sense - not just on the home page but on every page since not all your traffic comes from the home page.
• Quality graphics - Every pixel counts. There should even be enough white space so that your website doesn't look cluttered.
• Site search - Different people get to content in different ways. Some people use the navigation, some use the site map and others use the search right away.

Most essentially (is that a word?) is your marketing research and copywriting. I'm obviously not a professional copywriter... I just play one on TV. Your copy should be in the same voice, speaking to the correct audience and be concise and effective. It should be easy to scan and provide what people are looking (searching!) for.

If you're ready to move your website up a few notches, then contact Webstix and let's plan a successful website for your business or organization.

-Tony