3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website
It is said that having a good foundation is fundamental to having a strong building to last for years to come. The same goes when it comes to developing your website. Before you start plans on how to market your site, it always pays dividend to take a step back and review the website to ensure that its fundamentals are right.
Here’s three items on the list of checklist to ensure that your site is able to capture users for long term benefits. The three simple ways to dramatically improve your website are as follows:
Mental Note 1 – Get them Hooked
The internet has changed since the old days back in 2004, there are a lot of things happening on screen that distracts your users’ attention. Browsers with multiple tabs also then to fight for attention, apart from this you still have real world distractions to compete with like answering phone calls, etc. Before long your user forgets what they have been reading or the site they were visiting. I bet this happens too many of us.
Provide tools to allow visitors to bookmark your article or site easily. The best place is to have it position near the top of the article. Also note that you should only display 3 bookmark links and an option to select others so as to not let the bookmarking tool snatch attention away from the page content. You can try out tools like addthis helps websites add a simple bookmarking tool
Mental Note 2 – Show the Visitor What They Want
You manage to attract visitors to your site and they feel complied to click through to your inner pages. Your site is content rich, however they can’t find the content that they are looking for. This isn’t good as it is commonly known when you present users with too much choice they tend not to make any decisions.
So to tackle this, make sure your site layout and content structure is properly sorted out. You would need to have clear navigation menus or breadcrumbs to allow users to navigate across the entire site. Having a HTML sitemap is also an essential item as this provides visitors with a bird’s eye view of your site structure.
Mental Note 3 – Use Nice Smoothing Colours
Ever been to a site that turns you offer visually upon arrival? In the past, there were many badly made websites. This has since changed, however there are still some design mistakes made by designers or site owners that do turn off users visually.
As a rule of thumb, always use web safe colours like white background, with dark font colours. Make sure the font size is also within an acceptable height and width. I normally use 11 pixel points for most of my sites. That’s the font size that works best for me. However do ask your readers if that’s the best size for them.
Do you have another mental note on how to dramatically improve your website’s performance, why not share a tip or so here – Drop a comment or contact me
3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You
If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.
Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t! That’s why you need a form.