In keeping with this month’s blog post theme, “Love your business”, here are our top 3 tips for how to make people love your website (and avoid a lot of arguments).
1. Get the design right
This one is always difficult; everybody is a design critic. Some are more influential than others. The ones you need to be aware of are yourself and your target audience. Your opinion of the website isn’t as important as your target audience. Your website will experience a much higher bounce rate (the percentage of single-page visits, i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page) if the site design doesn’t work properly.
A few simple rules ought to put this right.
- For text, use a couple of complementary fonts, ensuring the size and colour contrast make the text easy to read.
- For images, make sure they aren’t too large, which will take a long time to download for people using a slow Internet connection on a smartphone, for example.
- Ensure the design works well at all device resolutions; you don’t want to alienate people who are using smartphones or tablets.
- Pages should load in under 5 seconds and preferably less than 3.
2. Make the content easy to find
First, before you create content, find out who your target audience is. Once you have it, plan a site structure a maximum of two levels deep. Burying your content inside a multi-level menu (or not linking it to a menu structure at all) is virtually guaranteed to ensure it won’t be found by your target audience, making people either rely on searching or losing them altogether. Sensible information architecture, thinking through carefully how and what your target audience access on your website, will work wonders in reducing the bounce rate and increasing page views.
By all means include a search function on your website, but don’t make your target audience rely on it to find your content. Making the content easy to find by search engines by making good use of keywords and descriptions for your posts and pages, together with text descriptions for images, will do wonders for your search engine visibility, guaranteeing new and returning visitors.
3. Get the word out
The number 1 method of getting your content noticed is to use social media. Everyone should really have a Facebook Page and a website with a blog pretty much regardless of what you do. You can optionally add Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. once you’ve established priorities. Making your content easily shareable is going to boost your visibility. Let your target audience do the hard work of promoting you by sharing the content.
The number 1 method of getting your content noticed is to use social media. Share on XBy following these simple rules, you should be well on the way to loving your website and, more importantly, making sure your target audience loves it and keeps coming back.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
