You could define “a great website” a variety of ways. However, there is a common denominator in all of them summer up by: A great website inspires the visitor to take action. Of course, the best website in the world won’t invoke an action every time. However, when you understand and apply the elements that make a great website, your chances for success increase. Here are 12 ways you can make a killer website!
1. Understand a website’s goals
Knowing your purpose, mission, and key end goal for creating the site will act as a benchmark on whether you are making progress. Keep a written record of this to help.
2. Forge a plan
The best websites start with a blue print. You can begin creating this by asking:
What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the main purpose of the website? Who is the website for?
3. Build a solid foundation
Your website can’t be great unless it’s built on a solid foundation—one you own and control. In other words, it should not reside on or depend on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Medium, WordPress.com, Blogger.com or any other “rental” property.
Build a foundation for your website by purchasing at least one unique domain that your company owns, housing it on a server or reliable hosting platform with impressive uptime and using a content management system (CMS) that enables you to publish easily and scale as you wish.
4. Develop and maintain your brand
Your brand isn’t defined by one thing, such as a logo. Your logo, tagline, color scheme, fonts, design, imagery, voice, and overall customer experience all factor into how your brand is perceived. All of these factors must be considered when developing your site.
5. Make it fast
The pages of your website should load fast and completely—as in 2 or 3 seconds. Slow loading pages will chase visitors away and negatively impact your search engine rankings.
6. Make it intuitive
When visitors have a bad experience on your website, their foremost critique is that they can’t find what they seek. Use a simple hierarchy to guide them through the site without thinking.
7. Map it
Make your header and footer effective GPS systems for users to elongate their visits and satisfy their needs. As you’re probably aware, both headers and footers tend to be persistently present regardless of the page the visitor is on.
8. Be clear
Your copy needs to be concise and clear. To do this, use descriptive headlines that clearly communicate the value proposition. Resist the temptation to put cleverness before clarity. Your page needs a purpose. Your headline and other elements should support it as deliberately as possible.
9. Be clean
It’s critical to serve cleanly designed, uncrowded pages that deliberately guide the visitor’s eyes path. While it’s more simple to purchase website templates that flow nicely, but it’s also easy to mess them up as you customize your pages. Suffice to say, lurking behind great websites are the creative contributions of graphic design and UX masters.
10. Be thorough
Great websites deliver answers thoroughly and immediately in context with the buyer journey. Don’t make the visitor click around to gather the pieces of the story you want to convey.
11. Keep building
A great website is an ever-expanding entity. Your website is a medium, a publication. It should be home to a blog, vlog, podcast, resource center, gallery, or some combination of content types. A website that’s designed, published and then left untouched delivers no reason for visitors to return or subscribe.
12. Optimize for search
Assuming you’ll count on search engines to direct new users to your website, it must be optimized for search. We have many blogs about this topic if you scroll down a bit further.
If you want to make your website killer, or just learn how to improve them more, reach out to My Social Biz for your complementary audit and free consultation.