Is Your Website A Little More Than a Pretty Face?

Is Your Website A Little More Than a Pretty Face?

by | Jan 19, 2017 | Business, Web Design, WordPress

Laptop At DeskBeautiful images. Bold color schemes. A sleek design.

These are all important elements of a great website design. After all, they are the first things a new visitor notices and judge you by.

Your website acts as a virtual front door to your business. If people don?t like what they see inside, they hit the back button and leave without converting. But, here?s the deal: although the design is one of the most important factors in deciding the credibility of a company, functionality plays a more important role.

Think about it that way: would you spend time on a site that looks good but works poorly? Probably not.

Let?s take a look at all the important elements that, together with the design, make your website a force of nature.

  • Comfort Comes First

The number one trick to follow is to build your website so as to provide comfort to your customers. You want everything to be as easy and flowing as possible. That said, if any design feature interferes with your site?s functionality, then you should disable it. Try to identify what would provide users with a seamless onsite experience and implement those instead.

Last but not least, make it easy for potential prospects to contact you. Include a search bar, preferably on the top of your blog. Fast, easy access to desired information is essential.

  • Responsive Website Design

One the same note, you want to make your website responsive for mobile use. A wide majority of the time spent online is on mobile devices. You want your web design to be easily translatable into various screen sizes. To make sure your website runs smoothly via smartphones and tablets, test it with Google?s Mobile-Friendly Test.

  • Make It Relevant and Specific

While you do want to have enough content and features to cover up a wide spectrum, relevance is still important. In other words, you need to cut the fluff and stick to what matters to your audience. Sure, everyone might be talking about the latest trend in tech, but that doesn?t mean you should jump on the bandwagon if the topic doesn?t fit your business profile.

  • User-Centric Design

This might sound obvious, but your website?s design and functionality must fit your customer?s needs like a glove. Know your target audience well enough to translate their needs into your web design. Think about what they might want when they land on your page and try to put that information in front of them. Make navigation simple and intuitive and don?t make them think too much about how to find their ways around your site.

If you don?t know where to start from, try asking yourself this: Why would anyone want to visit my website?

Do a thorough research ? there are plenty valuable resources out there on what user-centric design is and how to apply it.

  • Don?t Forget about SEO

Last but so not least, don?t forget that a well-designed website can help with your SEO efforts. Google prefers websites that have a clean structure with friendly navigation, solid backlinks, and descriptive image file names. ?

Building a good website that looks great and works properly is no easy task. By paying attention to these elements, you can rest assured that your website won?t be just another pretty face on the internet.

4 Pillars for Article and Blog Marketing

by | Oct 18, 2011 | Off Topic

Using articles and blogs is the backbone of good SEO. There are those who will give you a range of strict guidelines when writing for search engine optimisation, but there is one thing we can always be sure of, and that is to produce the best content. As Google always advises, there is nothing like good content. If we are going to write, we should always write about what we know, and what will provide useful information for our potential clients and customers. Article writing is one of the best ways to build authority for our site (this includes our website design), both in terms of how Google sees us, and how readers see us. Building our authority will take some time, and so a step-by-step approach is always recommended. Here are the crucial rules to writing and distributing your content.

  • Content is King. There is nothing like good content. Content coming from your own experience, and from what you know, will be fresh and unique. No one has the ability to deliver content with the fresh perspective like you do as a professional in your field. Never try to write what others are writing about. Write about what you think is important based on your own professional experience. Write it for now, and post it for now. At the same time, fresh content gets the attention of search engines.
  • Understanding Online. It is important for us to understand we are writing articles for an online audience. This means we need to write with short and clear sentences. If you have built up skills of good email writing, you can use the same methods. In short, you need a clean and clear title, your article length should be no longer than 800 words (no shorter than 500), you have a clean and thoughtful introduction, and get straight to the point.
  • Placing Our Content. Placing our content is just as important as having good content. Understanding authority and ranking is a perfect example of how we can see Google and real reader issues coming together. An authority site will have a high Google ranking on a particular subject. Readers will respect the same site. The higher the ranking of a particular site, the higher the importance of the links we have placed in our articles back to our own site. This will lead to our own site ranking higher over time. Therefore, we want to submit our articles to sites of higher importance/ranking, to get more exposure and backlink ranking value from those sites. To get onto those higher ranking, more important sites, we need to have good content they can use. It is that simple.
  • Keywords and Linking. We know we need keywords in our article for it to be found in search. At the same time, we should write naturally. Not using words, or overly using words will mean our content looks unnatural to readers and to Google. The same goes for our backlinking. Those who are experienced in online marketing with articles will advise on only two backlinks per article. Those backlinks should be natural, while being the right keywords for your own page optimization. As always, good, natural content is always the best, and it is that content that will be accepted by authority sites, and it is that content readers will admire the most.

Marketing yourself, your company and your website through content takes time. It is important you are regularly posting articles and other content. As you build your site?s rank and visitor rating, you can develop your other areas of online brand and image development, such as social media marketing, with the same step-by-step approach.