Your opening a business and you want to develop and design a website for it to let the world know about your ideas. Where do you start?
We’ve just been contacted by a potential client that’s in this same situation the only difference is they have a website but it’s poorly done! Remember when you were in high school and developed your first website in HTML 1.0? You get the idea!
While I was reviewing said website and started writing down our recommendations to improve it, I thought this would make a good blog post.
Here are a few tips that can help you improve your website in ten minutes:
- Who are you and what do you do? Tell me what your big idea is and why should I care. Have it present on every single page, in marketing speak this is called your ‘unique value proposition’.
- People don’t read, they scan. Prioritize. Not all text is important, help people know what is important to them by having headers in different colors, short paragraphs and bullet points.
- Most people don’t use menus for navigation. There needs to be linked text within the content that takes a visitor to another page.
- What do I do next? Need to have clear calls to action buttons or text after copy that tells the visitor what to do next.
- Make sure your website is optimized for search engines. Make sure to have keywords present in the copy, headers, page titles and description.
- Make your most important content stand out. What’s your big idea? Some of the most important content is hidden in interior pages, help people know what your most important content is.
- Make it easy for people to find you. Add local information in the home page like where you’re located, phone number, etc.
- Tell your story. Why are you doing this? Have an about page to tell your story. If this is your dream, let people know how excited you are.
- What’s this about? Every page in your website must have focus. For example if you sell birthday cakes of all kinds, make sure your internal page for ‘super hero cakes’ has only content related to that. In the short term this will help you rank better for that keyword.
Following these tips will point you in the right direction, in what other ways can you improve an existing website?
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