In this modern age of technology having a successful business often relies heavily on having a successful website; but how do you build a successful website?
We can boil this down to three points, or key tasks that need to be considered. They are:
- Design
- Usability
- Marketing
“You can have the prettiest website with the best functionality that ever existed, but if no-one visits it, it’s a failure”
Design is the first thing most people envision when thinking about their website. What should it look like? What font should I use? What colours should I make the background, my header and my footer? The website’s design is what creates the first impression the majority of your customers will have of your business. Because of this, it is extremely important. You need a design that reflects your industry and the message you want to convey about your business. For example, a lawyer’s website that looks like a high school blog and uses comic sans is very unlikely to help the business succeed, in fact it’s more likely to do the opposite and cause potential clients to look elsewhere because the impression they got from the website was that the lawyer isn’t overly professional.
Now that we’ve successfully got the attention of your potential customers we need to make sure they can use your website to find the information they need in order to go from a potential customer to a paying customer. This is usability or the user experience (UX) of a website. If a website is difficult to navigate or certain functions don’t work that potential customer is likely to give up, frustrated, and go right to a competitor. This is all about creating the right layout and structure for your website and, of course, delivering clear, precise, functional calls to action.
