Getting your business website right can be a case of trial and error, but the reality is that you want as little trial and as few errors as possible in the present day; getting the website wrong isn’t the end of the world for your business, but it is an obstacle. The important thing to realize is that there are various ways you can miss with your original plan for a website. There’s the execution, which can be repaired in moments, and there’s the concept – and this is the part that you really want to be getting right from the word “go”.
Different types of business will have different concepts for their websites, naturally. But there are elements that need to be in place whatever your business niche is. And below, we’re going to look at the most essential rules you need to ensure are in place when you’re building your website or talking with the likes of crdone to get it finished.
Don’t confuse your users
It’s astonishing that we are still in an era where people find themselves arriving at a website with an end goal in mind, and are confronted with a home page that gives them zero clues on how to achieve that goal. You may want to stand out from the crowd and do something innovative with your home page, but the place for tricks and flourishes is beneath the cut. Your website should have a hero section that sets out why you’re the answer to the customer’s questions, and there should be a prominent search menu available to them without them needing to scroll down or click some hidden door. Make it easy for them to give you money.
Make your CTAs prominent
It’s understandable that people look for as smooth a flow as they can possibly achieve when building a website, and when putting all the elements together. It makes a lot of sense that people writing SEO content will try and slot keywords and anchor texts in as unobtrusively as possible. But when it comes to CTAs, there really is no point trying to be seamless. They’re calls to action. By their very nature, they can’t just be dropped in there and ignored, so don’t try to make them seamless. Make them stand out in a reasonable way; so while you don’t want them to be on gleaming yellow text on an orange background, they should be bold, emphatic and larger than the other text around them.
Unity of purpose
There is a good chance that constructing a website – or at least deciding on how its functionality is realized – will involve multiple people. Someone will be responsible for content. Someone else will be deciding how it is coded. Another person might be responsible for deciding how it all looks. Someone, probably you, will have to take responsibility for how all of these things fit together. You may find that the others each think their element is more important than the rest, but if you want the overall plan to become a reality, they all need to play their part and not be involved in a battle for prominence.
This may mean that there has to be regular calls and meetings focused on getting the website up and running without glitches. To avoid ego clashes, it is advisable to remind everyone that 33% responsibility for a website that is actually live and attracting traffic is much more important than 50% or even 100% of responsibility for something that’s stuck in development Hell.
David Meyer
Prince Kapoor
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Sudeep Banerjee