When designing a website it is easy to get bogged down with the way you want it to look rather and function rather than what is best for your business and customers. Depending on what type of website you have will determine what information you need on there. If you are looking to sell products or service online then you need to give your customers all the information upfront. This means you should include photos / videos, full descriptions etc on the page. If you are creating a lead generation site then you may not want to give all the information upfront as you may want to speak to the customer either face to face or on the phone to make it easier to complete a sale. Compare competitor websites to see what their web design offers the customer and make sure that you have considered whether you should include similar things in your own sites too.
Putting someone in charge of your website
If your company has a website then it may be worth-while putting one person or a team of people in charge of managing it. A website can be a great advertising tool for your business, but only if it is maintained and monitored closely. A website may be generating enquiries for you through phone, email or contact forms or possibly live chat and someone needs to take responsibility for answering these or passing the queries on to the relevant department. If you have an IT department you may well ask them to look after the website and report back on how the site is performing. It may be that your IT department will need some assistance when it comes to SEO for example (search engine optimisation) and therefor you may need to hire someone with web marketing experience or bring in an outside company to handle this side of the website for you.
Adding call to actions to your website
A website can be a great selling and marketing tool for your business. It can be a brochure site that showcases your products and services and aims to attract customers in to contacting you or it may be an ecommerce website where customers can actually complete their purchase online though the site. Regardless of what type of site you have you need to have call to action banner. Call to action banners can vary in design and content depending on what you want the customer to do. A banner stating “click here to receive a brochure” is one type of call to action and “call xxxx to discuss your project” is another type of call to action. There is a lot of psychology behind call to actions and the colours, text and even shape of the banner you should use in order to attract the most interaction with the users on the sites.
The journey of a customer
When you have a website it is important to try and find out what they do when they land on your website. Tracking the progress of visitors though your site can help highlight where there may be any issues that need to be addresses. If for example you find that everyone is leaving on a certain page, then you need to have a look at that page and see if you can find out what the issue is. It may be that the page is not laid out in a way that makes it easy for the customers to navigate round. It could even be that the page is not loading and you hadn’t realised or possibly that it’s the page that shows the prices for a product or service and it’s too high therefore putting people off. Once you have this information you can then start to run some tests. Change the layout of the page and see if that makes a difference. If not then try something else until you find the issue.
Are all your pages mobile compatible?
Your website should be compatible on all mobile devices regardless of the screen size or resolution. It may be that your site has been coded in such a way that it resizes all the elements correctly, but if not then you may need to either tweak the code or use a plugin to create a mobile version. There are a number of free tools out there to allow you to check if your website is mobile compatible but some of them will only check the URL you enter, not other pages within your site, for this reason it is worth checking each page using the tool to ensure that none of them are missed. Using tables with fixed widths causes many problems when it comes to mobile device compatibility as often they are not shrunk down with the rest of the site. If you are unsure you should check with your website developer.