One of the most important aspects of your website is making sure it is reaching your target group. Here are 10 website building tips to draw in more tips.
There are two important parts of building a website that can successfully bring in traffic. One part of the equation is having an exceptional SEO strategy in place. The other is having a well-designed website that your customers will love.
There's no point in having a website if your customers can't find it. An SEO strategy makes your website more visible to Google and other search engines so prospective clients can find you.
But it isn't enough to just bring traffic to your website, you need to keep users there too. And since people rate a website's visual design in less than a second, 50 milliseconds to be precise, this is where the design of your website becomes important.
Check out the following website building tips and you'll not only be bringing traffic to your website; you'll be improving your bounce rate as well.
10 Website Building Tips That Will Bring in Visitors
The best advice we can give you for building a new website is to always keep your buyer personas in mind. By putting yourself in your customers' shoes, you'll be in a better position to build something that they find useful.
1. Know Your Audience
Before you start building your website, you need to think about your audience or buyer personas. A buyer persona is a mockup of your perfect customer and includes everything from their likes and dislikes to problems that you can provide a solution for.
Using your buyer persona, you can start to think about what customers are trying to accomplish when they visit your site and design it accordingly. The design of your website should match your target demographics. If you're selling reading glasses and hearing aids, it hardly makes sense to design your website in millennial pink.
Additionally, you'll need to use these buyer personas when crafting your calls-to-action (CTAs) in order to drive conversions and increase sales.
2. Pick a Template with Your Audience In Mind
Once you've settled on the purpose of your website, you need to choose a template with that purpose in mind. Whether you're setting up your website on your own or working with a website developer, there are generally two ways of choosing a template; by style or by subject.
When you choose a template based on style, the best method is to start with a bare-bones template and add things as you need them. This will prevent you from adding a lot of unnecessary features that will make your website look crowded and disorganized.
The benefit of choosing a template that is designed for your business is that it will already include the pages and features that you need. Additionally, the navigation bar, colors and other physical features should be suited for your industry. The main downside is that your options may be significantly limited with this option.
3. Pick a Color Palette
Colors have a significant impact on how people view brands and products. Some colors are preferred by men versus women. For example, blue is associated with trust and security, whereas orange is associated with products that are cheap and fun.
Of course, part of this decision will be influenced by the color scheme that your business currently uses. Coca-Cola couldn't very well overhaul their website with a blue color scheme.
Besides the psychological associations that colors carry, you also need to think about how these colors will look on different displays and check the readability of the site.
4. Decide on Your Fonts
Not all fonts are the same and if you've ever landed on a website that's using Comic Sans or Papyrus, you quickly understand that not all fonts are acceptable. When choosing the style and size of fonts for your website, you want to consider how they reflect your brand and how they'll look on different sized displays.
There are no rules about the number of fonts that you can or should use on your website. But, if you only use one font for the whole page, the result is something that appears monotonous. On the other hand, using too many different fonts will make your website look chaotic. The key is making the page dynamic so that your headlines stand out.
5. Follow These Guidelines When Adding Images
Having good visuals is an important part of designing a professional and engaging website. On the other hand, bad images can ruin an otherwise well-designed site. Rather than getting into the never-ending debate of stock images versus original images, remember that a high-quality stock image should always trump a low-quality original image.
Make sure to use images that match your product and the demographics of your prospective clients. As a general rule, it's better to use positive images as opposed to negative ones. For example, if your client is a dental office, use a picture of a smiling family showing their teeth as opposed to someone lying on a dentist chair.
Don't use images that are low quality or too small. Remember that some people will be viewing your website on their desktop. If you use a 500px image as your background image, it will look horrible when it’s stretched out to 1920px. Also, try to avoid images that are unnecessarily large as they will slow down your website's load time.
6. First Impressions Matter
Like we mentioned at the beginning, you have less than a second to make an impression on a new user. By and large, these first impressions are design-related. When you're getting ready to launch your site, try to get feedback from unbiased people who work in your industry.
You're looking to deliver that "wow-factor" when someone first lands on your site. These users will know what to look for and be able to give you an honest opinion about whether or not you've achieved that goal.
The other part of a website's first impression is the loading time. As technology has advanced, we've come to expect that we can find information easily, and more importantly, quickly. In fact, if your website takes more than three seconds to load, you're losing out on prospective clients.
7. Keep Your Message Clear
Now, that we've covered the visual and technical elements of effective website building, let's dive into the content.
Everything that you write on your website should be clear, concise and essential. Especially on your home page and product pages, you don't want to include any superfluous content that distracts your audience from focusing on your services.
While you don't need to write for the laymen, it's important that content is written so that your prospective clients understand what they're reading. Further to that point, make sure that you're not talking down to your clients when explaining the services you offer.
For highly technical or specialized services, a great way to talk to your customer is by doing it through other customers. Include a section on your website with testimonials from previous clients. This will boost your credibility and help prospective clients understand the value that your service provides.
8. Greet Your Customers, But Be Cool
It's common practice to launch a pop-up after someone has been on your website asking them for their name and contact info. This gives brands a way to reach their customers and customers can easily stay updated on the brand's offerings. People are generally not annoyed by these pop-ups as long as they can easily dismiss them if they're not interested.
If prospective clients do decide to share their contact info with you, don't abuse it. Sending daily sales emails and product updates is excessive and irritating. Best case scenario, they unsubscribe from your list. Worst case, they mark your emails as spam.
9. Let People Know How to Get In Touch
Better yet, let your customers come to you when they have questions. Make it easy for prospective clients to get in touch with your company. Depending on the complexity of the services you offer and the type of community you're building, there can be many avenues for customers to get in touch with you.
No one wants to sit on hold on the phone for hours trying to get through to a company. Giving your customers options for getting in touch that doesn't waste their time shows that you value them as clients.
For simple questions, an FAQ section will do the trick. Customers are happy because they can instantly get answers to their questions and it works in your favor because you spend less time on customer service. Along with an FAQ page, a contact form will give clients the ability to reach out with more detailed requests than the FAQ addresses.
10. Consistently Update Your Website
Having an out-of-date website may be the only thing that's worse than not having a website at all. If prospective clients see that you've not updated your website in a long time, they may assume that you're not even in business anymore. Updating your website also improves your search engine optimization and gives current clients a reason to keep coming back.
Follow These Tips for More Traffic to Your Website
If you follow these website building tips, you will be able to not just draw more traffic to your website but keep it there as well. But building a website on your own is a huge undertaking. If you're not an experienced website designer, you may want to investigate hiring one rather than trying to do-it-yourself.
If you're looking for a professional web design company to assist you with your next project, do your research and begin soliciting proposals from reputable agencies.
Ashis Kumar is a passionate blogger loves to share creative thoughts.