5 Top Tips for your website

When it comes to designing and creating your website, there are many styles and directions you can choose from. You can make it simple, classic and minimalistic or vibrant, modern, playful and eye-catching.

While the final look and overall feel of your website may display your personal preferences, brand identity or line of work, a few basic things should always be applied to make it effective.

A fantastic web design can help you reach the business goals you are aiming for, as well as cater to the needs of your existing and potential clients. So that your website can be as compelling and effective as it should be, take a few minutes of your time to read and consider these 5 tips.

What is the purpose of your website?

This seems obvious but often overlooked – some people are never happy with their website, as they have no defined goals for it or have not even created a plan of what content they want on their website.

Support all of your key messages with strong calls to action on each page to notify people of what they have to do. For example, if you are selling an item, make it obvious how much it costs and how you purchase them. If you want to generate enquiries, make sure your contact details are visible on all pages – not just on the contact us page.

As previously mentioned, make sure you have contact details and calls to action on all pages. Make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you. Make people comfortable in contacting you with as few clicks as possible (ideally none) to find your contact details. Basic contact details should include an email address, telephone number and a contact form which they can fill out easily.

Do not use stock pictures if possible.

Have professional pictures taken for your website. If possible, do not use obvious stock images because people will feel more at ease with seeing your images and feel they can relate to you more easily.

Although this is only optional, choosing not to skimp on producing bespoke high-quality images for your website can be a plus factor if done properly. Meaningful images can help you reach your business goals. Poor quality and obvious stock images can hold you back.

We now live in an era of high definition. If your website is filled with low-resolution photos, it will make your website seem old or ineffective.

Video is very important too. Get some bespoke video content onto your website.

Also, use a bespoke website design, do not undo all of your hard work by using a generic theme.

Get search engines to notice you and eventually promote you.

Google Local Business is a free service, so make sure you enter all of your business’s details onto it and keep it up to date.

Regularly post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and get these referenced on your website.

Search engines like to see you are active and social media is a great way of showing you are engaging with people on the internet.

Provide Search Engines with more reasons to promote you against your competitors

Update your website’s content regularly. Create a blog or case studies section that you can regularly add content to. Constantly update your products and services too.

If you frequently update your website, search engines will be aware of this and regularly keep checking your website.

This will instil confidence in search engines that you are active, making them more confident in promoting your website and subsequently your business.

Maintain your website and make sure that you have your website regularly backed up.

Regularly backing up your website will come in handy. For instance, if your website gets hacked or loses valuable data, the backup can help solve your problems. As a matter of fact, backing it up doesn’t take too long. You only need a few minutes to complete the entire process.

Everybody makes mistakes every now and then. This may come in situations like creating changes that interrupt the functionality of your system or deleting an essential website file. Backing up your website will help you guard your asset against that kind of human error. It is true that there are many ways to address these errors but only a few options are as efficient as reestablishing a previous backup.

Updates are important in keeping your website functioning smoothly but in some cases, something may go unexpectedly wrong. So that you can reverse any type of problem caused by updates, an automatic backup system will come in handy. This will help you update the key components that run your website and present a restore point that can be made available to you. But before you start working on your website, make sure to manually back it up.

Data is very important and one reason for maintaining a backup system is to prevent any loss of data. A fully backed up website will not only keep your personal data safe, it will also keep other essential and sensitive data that runs your business safe and accessible.

If your website is running on WordPress or other content management systems, you are probably relying on many add-ons such as plugins and themes. These tools make your life so much easier but whenever you install a new add-on to your website, it may contain elements that may not be compatible with your existing plugins. Although adding new plugins may affect your current website ecosystem, it doesn’t mean you have to totally avoid it. You just need to review them and be sure they will not affect your system in a negative way. Checking out ratings and reviews is a good thing to do, and make sure the developers are frequently updating your preferred add-ons.

If your website is infected with malware, you need to make your website clean. Although this is not an easy task to do, a backup will help make things easier and faster.

If you are worried about your website’s security, feel free to contact Focus Web Studio and their team of highly-qualified web design experts will help and advise you on how to address your needs and problems.