Around two-thirds of businesses have a website, but having a website isn't enough. You need to learn how to run a successful website if you want to get results from your website.
Getting started is just the beginning. Learning how to get a website online is one thing, but learning how to create an effective website that will help with your marketing and sales is a horse of a different color.
We are here to help you, so continue reading this article to learn top tips for creating a good website and running it successfully.
Put a Strong Plan in Place
The best way to do things is to start off with a strong foundation. If you already have a website, you'll have to go in and shore up the foundation, but those of you that don't have a website can start off on the right foot.
Creating a plan for how you want your website to turn out is like creating the plans for a building project. The more in-depth the plans you create are, the fewer errors you're likely to make when you're building it.
Plan out the posts and pages for your website and what each of their purposes is. Knowing exactly what you want before you get started will help you keep from getting sidetracked.
Know who is going to manage the website successfully. Will it be you, an employee, or a website management company ensuring site success?
Focus On a Professional Design
When people visit your site, they are going to judge your company on their first impression. While you might hope you have all the time in the world to win them back over if they saw a bad website design, that's not the case.
Despite how much you improve, people are still going to have the thought of how your website looked when they first saw it in the back of their minds.
In fact, you may never get the chance at a second impression because they might opt to do business with a competitor.
Make sure your website design is consistent across all the pages. You should have a dedicated font and only a few colors that you use for the site. Make sure your website uses your brand colors, so you will build up brand awareness from your website and across social media and other platforms.
The images you use on your website should be clear and professional. While stock photography is acceptable, it is even better if you can use your own photographs.
Also, keep your website navigation in mind when you're working on the design of your website. If your website is difficult to navigate -- people will click away.
Site Speed
When people visit your website, the sooner they see your site the better. If it takes them multiple seconds to see the page pop up, they might click away or they might be annoyed as they try to go to the next page on your website.
Site speed also helps with search engine optimization, which is what we are going to talk about next.
Optimized for Search Engines (Google, Bing & More)
When you're creating your content, you need to keep search engine optimization in mind. Optimizing for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, YouTube, and other websites allow them to know what your website is about.
Google is usually the search engine people focus on optimizing for since it has the majority share of searches around the globe.
Keep in mind that SEO is more than just writing some keywords on your website to let search engines know what it is about. You need to place the keywords in the right places like in the title tag, meta description, within a header, in the conclusion and within image alt text.
Another way to help with SEO is through internal linking. Internal linking is linking from one of your own pages to another page on your website. Doing this allows you to pass ranking power from one page to another.
Create a Mobile Responsive Website
Many people view your website on their mobile device. If your website only shows up properly on desktops, not only will people click away, but Google won't be your ally.
Google did an update called the mobile-first update over a year ago. When they did that update, they put all the websites that were not mobile-friendly at the back of the queue for mobile users.
The time, effort, and money it takes to update your website to a mobile-friendly version is well worth it for user experience and also for better rankings on Google.
Check Your Website for Accuracy
If your website has any errors on it, it will make you less credible. Even a single spelling mistake can mean people see you as unprofessional. Take the extra time to check that you have your correct phone number, address, and true facts on the site, so people don't call you out on it.
You want to be a resource people can trust and checking your website for accuracy is one of the ways to make sure that is the case.
Growing Your Successful Website
Once you get your website up and running and you see it is a successful website, it is time to grow it to the next level. Online success breeds more success and once you start to build momentum -- it's all the way up!
Do you want to learn more about website development and other important topics related to successful web design? Visit the Web Dev section of the Bootstrap Business Blog to learn how to build and optimize a successful website that gets plenty of traffic.
