Hoping to revamp your website? We’ve compiled a list things to consider before building your first website, or revamping an old design.

Ease of use
Keep your site easy to navigate, and content should be short and sweet. Don’t get caught up adding bells and whistles and forget crucial business information like contact info, hours, and the physical address of your business.

Content structure
Your site should be “wide and shallow” meaning the first level is for those who know what they want and decide quickly. The second level is for consumers who need detailed points to be convinced. Keep paragraphs to three lines deep, or less. Good website structure will also enhance search engine optimization (SEO.)

 Chart from Cicada Online.

Have a clear call to action (CTA)

A call to action is an instruction to people visiting your website such as “subscribe now” or “click here.” As Kathryn Aragon points out, CTAs have three key elements: “A no obligation statement that removes or reduces risk, tell people what to do next [click the button below], and encourage people to respond right away.” 

Social media buttons
Connecting to your businesses social media accounts helps you market your business to new clients, will keep you top of mind for established clients, and leads to improved SEO. Make sure you are actively updating content, it’s worth the investment. Utilizing a website like Hootsuite can help you save time by scheduling multiple updates at once.

Zig when everyone else zags

As large header background images have become popular, some sites are standing out by using bold, sparse text only. Check out the refreshing simplicity of this front page:

As an added benefit, simplicity can lead to faster load times. A one second delay can cause a 7% loss in customer conversion TagMan explains. Good hosting is another key factor to keeping up speed. Paying $4/mo for hosting is tempting for small budgets, but poor hosting can also affect your rank in search engines since many search engine algorithms detect webpage loading speed.

A good website is part careful planning, intuitive design, and logical organization.

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