If you intend to attract and retain new visitors and maintain repeat customers you should work on creating killer site. A boring website will guarantee little or no activity on your site. There could be hundreds of other online companies that are offering the same service or product you offer, make it awesome.
Build an insanely great website today or redesign your old boring website now–your business depends on it. Your duty as a business owner is to conceive what you expect on your site and work closely with the web designer mocking up and designing your site. These are a few of the new rules of designing a great website.
1. Ask the right questions before touching web design tools
What are your business objectives and goals, who are your visitors and what do you expect them to do on your site once they get there. What do you expect your visitors to do once they get on your site: subscribe to your email list, sign up for something, buy your product or share your information. These are just a few of the important questions you need to answer before you build a website or decide to fix your old website.
2. Start with mobile in mind
The number of people accessing websites on their mobile devices are increasing at an amazing rate and most businesses are now building mobile friendly sites that can attract and retain visitors. If your site breaks on a mobile device, it’s a bad sign. The good news is that you have the opportunity to make it right today.
If you already have a website running, make sure your mobile visitors are seeing right. Depending on the kind of content you want to serve your mobile visitors, you could build a completely different mobile site or you could build a responsive site.
3. Make it responsive, your future depends on it
If you decide to make it responsive, the good news is that you don’t have to update both the main and the mobile sites separately. Your site will respond to most mobile devices once you make it responsive.
A lot of online media companies and new businesses are now adopting responsive websites as the number of people browsing the web from mobile devices keep increasing. And the best part is that your site will amaze your visitors. Responsive designs are the new trend and it works.
4. Content is still king
Content still rules when designing a website. People browse to access relevant information, to be educated, make a purchase based on information presented or fulfill the need to connect with other people. What do you intend to serve your visitors? Once that objective is clear, make it insanely easy for your visitors to find what they want.Keep it simple.
Don’t make them think, just provide it. Think like a visitor and answer their questions before they even think about it. When visitors want to make a sign up or purchase decisions, they will need all the information necessary to successfully complete the process. Make it convincing and easy to find.
5. Make prudent use of images
If you can and it rightly fits your goals and objectives, make use of great images. Images stick better than texts. If you can convey a message in a form of an image, take that option and you better be great at it, otherwise you will convey the wrong message about your business. Website layouts can be attuned for a specific emotion based on images you use and the stories they convey.
Some businesses are even using large background images to send a specific message. This trend is not for every business, you should only use large images if they can enhance your message.
6. Leave it to the experts
There are great design companies and freelancers out there who have lots of experience in designing awesome sites and mobile apps. Focus on doing what you do best– selling your product or service and get an expert to design your site for you.
If you have a great designer in-house, you can work directly with him or her to achieve your goals. The level of communication now makes it even easy to outsource your design requirements to that awesome freelancer who lives at the other side of the ocean.
Designing a killer site is still an uphill battle, but it’s definitely worth it. For those of you that have built insanely great sites already, anything to add? For those of you that haven’t, any questions I didn’t cover?
first appeared on altostartups.com
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