Your website is the window to your business for a proportion – if not all – of your customers. They want to know who you are, why you’re better than the competition and, most importantly, what’s in it for them. When was the last time you went on to a website to see if you could help them out with something? Here are a few tips for getting it right when you’re designing your window to the world.
1. Start with the Basics
As the Guardian points out, the most important things on a website are that it works and that it grabs people’s attention. Think of your own browsing experience. If a site is slow or unresponsive, you’ll come straight out of it. The same goes for a dull site that doesn’t give you any reason to stay there. If the content is no good, why would you stick around?
2. Be Careful with Your Images
There are three basic rules of images. Firstly, if they’re not yours, credit them. Secondly, you need images and they need to be good. Thirdly, everything in moderation. The most wonderful photograph will still put people off from using your website if it’s so huge it prevents them from loading the page on their mobile device or makes the site unresponsive.
3. This Is a Local Pub for Local People
If you’ve ever walked into a pub as a tourist and heard that phrase, you’re not the only one. Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably been given that general impression if you’ve walked into the wrong establishment. And why did you walk in? Because you didn’t know the market. The same thing applies to web design. If you’re designing a website for a business in Essex, use a company whose business is web design in Essex such as Enovate. Don’t use a multinational corporation that charges you a fortune and has no local knowledge whatsoever. They could very easily send you hurtling into the abyss of offending the locals. There’s no way back from that.
4. Respect People’s Privacy
These days, if you run a website you will naturally gather people’s data. This may be through a newsletter sign-up, a customer making a purchase or even just a comment on your blog. A survey published in the Telegraph revealed that four out of five of us are concerned about their privacy online. But is that really such a revelation? We have always been wary of sharing too much information. After all, we are British, so we hardly wear our hearts on our sleeves. But learn from this, as the way we treat data is one of the most important things to our customers.
Designing a website can seem difficult, but if you follow those very basic tips, you should avoid some of the major pitfalls. The main thing to remember is that you want people to choose you. When your website is finished, get some really independent honest people to go to it without any instructions and see if they can use it. Take their feedback on board; it won’t be what you want to hear, but it will be what you need to hear.
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