How engaged are you in launching a professional website?
For many industries, a website is the main entrance for new and established customers. While we wait for commerce and lifestyles to progress into a new normal, there are steps you can take now in our current economic climate to develop or check your website for quality and performance. Regular checks such as eCommerce POS testing and general content updates are involved, but here are few more tips to stay on track.
Design and Style
Branding Your Business – Consistency is Key
Branding is linked to marketing and includes your business name, slogan, logo and colour palette. Branding is an attention-grabbing profile, unique only to you, and critical for cutting through online noise. In order to be effective, branding must be consistent. Match your business name, logo, slogan, domain name and colours for standardization then stick to your final decision through the span of your business. Switching your branding midstream can really confuse your customers.
Using Colour in Your Website Design
Colour has a powerful effect on perception (made you look). Do you want to impress your customers with bright eye-catchers to complement floral arrangements, or blues to express reliability for your law firm? When planning your colour combination, try to stick with two compliments and one neutral for balance. The next time you are in a home improvement store, pick out your favourite colour patch from their paint department. Basically, the psychology of colour postulates:
Red – excitement, strength, love and energy
Orange – confidence, sociability, bravery and success
Yellow – creativity, cheerfulness and warmth [like the sun!]
Green – nature, healing, freshness
Blue – competence, loyalty and trust
Pink – sweetness, sincerity, compassion
Purple – royalty, luxury and spirituality
Brown – ruggedness, dependability, steady
Black – formality, security, drama
White – honesty, simplicity, cleanliness
Search online for a colour emotion charts for more information on this fascinating topic.
Logos
When it comes to marketing, your logo is your best friend. This symbol guarantees your identity and can even be protected via registered trademarking. Using your logo on digital ads, your website and social media, provides a symbol of recognition for your customers. Your logo will be on business cards and stationery, product labels, invoices and email signatures. Beware of using a complex logo design that may look artistic, but lacks meaning. If a customer sees your logo for the first time, will they know what you sell?
Check and correct your website load speed.
Bloated pages that load sluggishly are a sure-fire way to lose customers. Fast. Your site may load like a bullet for you, but remember page speeds vary across device use and networks. Test your website by typing your URL into any of the free [and safe] speed tools you find in Google search results. One of the best ways [and most understandable] to speed up your site is to optimize your images. Photos and graphic art are essential to all websites, whether they appear in headers, blogs, product pages or galleries. Make sure your photos are optimized for online display by reducing the image and file size. Many of us choose a pre-built theme for our website, but if you are creating your own, search “image sprite generators” for free online tools to group multiple images into one big image and display them using CSS background positioning. Check out this WordPress article for more information on exactly how this process works. Test your site with Google’s PageSpeed tool to analyze your content and get suggestions for improvement. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will guide you through every step you need to complete this task.
Social Media Feeds
Social media feeds add dynamic content directly onto the page of your choice. SM is a great way to connect with your audience to announce specials, update product information and announce new services. If your product is photogenic, Instagram is a good choice to add creativity and eye candy to your page. Search engines love dynamic content and if video is your forte, sign up for a pro YouTube account and launch those iPhone scenes you shot of your orchard or ‘how we made it’ shots. Social media feeds keep your audience on your site longer for a rich experience and builds trust for local entrepreneurs.
Check Your Links
You can analyze your website links by entering your domain or URL into a free service such as Semrush. After you find all your backlinks, you can sort them by type to check them for breaks and even study competitor links. Solid linking strategies boost SEO performance and user experience. Broken links however, are a sure-fire sign the owner is not engaged with site maintenance and will negatively affect website conversion for sales. In a nutshell: your page will not rank well with broken links with either search engines or your audience. Caused by broken backlinks, a 404 error message is a client-side event that means the page they are seeking has been deleted or moved and the URL for that particular page has not been modified by the webmaster. These are important errors to fix, because they can, once again, detrimentally affect rankings and user experience.
Do you need a new website? Looking for eCommerce solutions?
If launching a quality website is in your plans, we invite you to call us for a consultation. We support local business and industry by building and managing online solutions. Every business has its own unique persona to highlight to the world, and we are here for technical support and consultations every step of the way. Check out our portfolio.