What is it that you are trying to do with your website?

 

Are you trying to sell t-shirts on-line? Are you trying to sell goods? Are you trying to spread your business name out there for more people to see, enhancing your brand awareness? Or do you wish to have people donate to the animal rescue fund you are looking to start or promote?

 

Whichever the case is, everything will start with a Great Website to make your products and/or services shine, or make people click on your links that lead to your proposals. 

 

Odds are, just simply making a website for the sake of making a website, disregarding the full optimizations including but not limited to concept, design, user-friendliness, functionability, etc. will not make the conversion rate you are looking for. 

 

So what would be considered a Great Website?

 

Below are important factors that will help you optimize your website and help you get the results you are looking for:

 

• Clear Purpose: Every Business will need to have a Mission or a Clear Concept. You need to ask yourself, “What is the purpose of my business?”. People need to fully understand what your business is offering. Have You ever heard of people saying something like, “What does this business do? I’m confused. What are they trying to accomplish?” Whether you have, or have not heard people say that about your  business, one thing is for sure…You definitely don’t want to hear that.

• Well Designed: Have you ever walked into a restaurant just because the exterior of the place looked clean and pleasant? I’m sure there are times that a restaurant or restaurants caught your eye, and therefore you decided to give it a try (let’s face it…while many people like to eat great quality food, a pleasant atmosphere also gives customers the ideal experience). If the links and images are all over the place, colors are not matching the concept of the website and looks bland, or you see something cluttered and unbalanced within the website, odds are users would think your website is ugly and would not like to spend their precious time at your website…unless it’s something like a government run website. Remember that your website reflects your company, your products/services, and ultimately your brand. It is imperative to make it visually appealing, professional, and amazing!

• Functional and Quality Assured: If the links to your website bring up a 404 page or can’t be found within the web browser, and/or your website is loading at a super slow speed, there clearly is a problem. How can people find your website and check out what you have to offer when nothing comes up when they enter your website URL or click on a link that leads to your website? These need to be checked frequently and quality assurance needs to be taking place quite often. If users see that your links do not work, or your website loading speed is slow, chances are they will be frustrated and be encouraged to leave the website. Websites always need to be up to speed and fully functional for pleasant user experience.

• Easy to Use/User Friendliness: Many users are in a hurry to always get to the point. They want to easily navigate their way through to the sales page and have a smooth transaction. These kinds of pleasant experience will surely bring the users back to your page, potentially leading to more sales and/or having people share links to your website. They don’t want to deal with any hassle, get right to what they are looking for, and call it a day.

• Mobile-Friendliness: As much as your website needs to bring a pleasant experience on desktops/laptops and tablets, if your website is not optimized for mobile users, a big chunk of your sales are lost at that point. Needless to say, many users especially in developed countries are using their mobile phone to browse as consumers are able to check out websites and buy products/services from their mobile phone screens. If you would like to capitalize on those users, which accounts for the majority of the population (of course depending on which demographic you are targeting, but even seniors would use their phones these days to use Google or Yelp to search something), you would definitely need to optimize for mobile! Images need to be visually pleasing and clear, text needs to be clear and concise (for the most part, unless people like to read long, informative news or blogs), and all the clutters need to disappear. 

• Fresh Quality & Great Content: Stay on top of your website, make it interesting and engaging by constantly adding in fresh feeds, new images, products, and informative content. People love to read helpful information that is relevant to what they are searching or view vividly attractive images and videos. Blogs, YouTube, and Social Media can be great ways to promote fresh feeds. Make sure your website is linked to those, as this investment will be a great factor to boost your SEO rankings and bring more quality traffic to your website. Just be accurate, make sure you have no spelling or grammar errors (or limit them), and update regularly.

• Add Contact Info & Location If Possible: If you have a contact information that users can reach easily, whether it be a business phone #, cell phone #, or e-mail address, it would be a great idea to have it on your website. If people have questions or concerns regarding your products/services, you want to make sure they can easily reach you so you can gain trust and credibility by getting back to them and clearing up any questions or concerns they might have (and of course, the sooner the better). If you have a physical office or location for your business, make sure to share that on your website as well as this can be another trust factor that can add legitimacy to your business.

• Clear, Easy to Navigate Call to Action: If you do not ask for people to “Click here”, or say “Buy Now”…people won’t. These links need to be clearly visible, and users need to know what to do, and how to buy the products and services you are offering. This is basic, but it is an easy way to increase conversion rate.

• Optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Social Media: Building up a foundation is important but driving traffic to your website is equally as important. You would want to make sure customers who are looking for the products and services your business is offering find them through your website. SEO optimization, is definitely the first thing you would need to look at to drive relevant traffic to your website in hopes of converting the visit to sales. Otherwise, all the effort of making a beautiful website with great visuals/content would be for naught! There are tons of ways to optimize for SEO but here are a few that you can definitely start with:

1. 1. Make sure title tags, html tags, meta tags and descriptions involve the keywords you are looking to rank on Google or any other search engine for. 
   2. Make sure you have links within the website that leads to other pages in your website.
   3. Content needs to be relevant to the products and services people are searching for on search engines. I.e. If you are selling shoes, make sure you have many shoe related keywords in your website.
   4. Use CSS and make sure HTML coding is uncluttered and set it up so everything looks neat and aligned (texts, links, images, videos, etc.)
   5. Create shareable content! To do so, start by providing value to your target audience as much as you can via content marketing, blogging, informative videos, etc. If those can be shared via social media to their friends, family, or community, the more chance your sales will grow. There are millions of social media users and sharing content through social and making it easily shareable to other people will surely help drive more relevant traffic to your website.

Creating a well functioning website sure is not easy and it can be time consuming. Usually people do not know where to start, what to write, how to design their texts, how to align them, input visually appealing images, and fully optimize their website. Most people almost always forget to add legal disclaimers and privacy policies as well (so make sure you don’t forget!). 

 

Because almost every industry is competitive in today’s world, it is imperative for businesses to have a great (or amazing) website that is fully optimized to stand out and compete in today’s world. 

 

To do this on your own, it will take a while but it will be worth it! Or you can go ahead and hire a pro. 

 

Below are some services for beginner friendly website builders:

Wix

GoDaddy

Squarespace

Hostgator

Shopify (Great for online stores)

Below are some services for hosting your websites:

GoDaddy

Hostgator

 

*I personally use Hostgator for both hosting & website building via WordPress as it was convenient for me. Everyone is different so please do your own research and see what works best for you.