Are you giving your website the right level of attention?
It’s remarkable to consider the ways in which the internet’s presence in the business world has changed over the years.
There was a time when a website was something that was really only useful for specifically tech-oriented companies or huge corporations. The truth was that not many people actually had internet access at all and that meant that it simply wasn’t a priority for the majority of businesses.
However, thanks to the reduced price of personal computers as well as the rise of high-speed broadband and smartphones, the internet is as much of an integral part of the modern business world as just about everything else, perhaps even more so.
So if your business doesn’t have some kind of website, you’re not running a business for the modern era; it’s as simple as that. However, that doesn’t mean that simply having a website is going to be enough to guarantee success.
As the internet became more popular and therefore less and less of a novelty, the standards that people expected from it got higher and higher. Where it might once have been exciting enough to have a website in the first place, you now have to meet many more standards than that if you really want to impress your customers.
A lot of this comes down to the little details which, all too often, get ignored. In order to prevent that from happening, here are some crucial details of your website that you cannot afford to miss.
It’s also important to note that, if you would like to learn to build a website from scratch, you can take Web Developer certification courses. These are available online and will teach you all the technical aspects of a website.
Design
It might sound a little bit harsh to say, but customers are often a pretty shallow bunch overall. This is actually pretty understandable when you think about it. After all, there are more businesses around than ever before, all vying for a customer’s attention.
Most people simply don’t have the time to investigate different businesses with any real depth. This means that they have to rely on surface-level things in order to find a business that suits their needs.
This means that the design of your website has to communicate a lot of things very quickly. Not only does it have to make your website simple and and easy to navigate with as few animated web transitions as possible, but it also needs to be aesthetically pleasing enough to catch the customer’s attention.
There are plenty of places to look online to learn about good web design, but the best thing to do is to look at some of the most effective websites on the internet and analyze what it is that really makes them work.
It’s likely that you’ll start to find patterns between different sites and when that happens, you’ll know what it is that you need to incorporate into your own website’s design.
Performance
Of course, it’s not going to matter how well designed and aesthetically pleasing your website is if it doesn’t function properly. Sure, the way your website looks is going to be the first thing that attracts a customer’s attention, but if it doesn’t work properly, then they’re going to abandon it pretty quickly.
The most common reason why this tends to happen is that your website’s host isn’t ready for the amount of traffic that you can see when your business becomes successful.
It’s important to check out places like Hosting.co.uk to find the best possible web hosting service possible. Reliable web hosting can often mean the difference between a functional website and one that crashes every time it loads.
Similarly, you need to make sure that navigating your websites is as simple and intuitive as possible. Don’t worry about flashy graphics and animations, if your website is functional, that’s all you really need.
Things like that might have been impressive when the internet was a novelty, but people simply don’t have the patience for anything other than a website that is simple, fast, and reliable. Many of the most successful websites in the world are specifically designed to be as simple and accessible as possible and this is something that you should be willing to embrace.
Connections to social media
There was a time, even after the internet became a part of most people’s everyday lives when your website would likely be your business’s only presence online. It would be the place that hosted your online store, your blog, and everything else that customers needed from you. If they wanted to contact you, then they had to email you directly or sign up for some kind of mailing list.
However, we are now living in the social media age which means that more and more people are finding their attention split over multiple sites that they frequent incredibly often.
This means that alongside your website, your business needs everything from a Facebook page, a Twitter account, as well as dozens of other social media profiles. Not only should you keep these updated frequently and interact directly with your customers through these channels, but you need to make sure that things on your website can connect to social media as easily as possible.
You need to be able to reach your social media pages from your site as well as offering customers the chance to share things from your website and blog to their own profiles.
The internet is here to stay – so make the most of it!
The reality is that, no matter what you might think of it, the internet is here to stay and there really isn’t anything that any of us can do about that. The ways in which we interact with it have changed radically since the early days of the web but the one thing that has been consistent is how much it has grown in importance in our day-to-day lives.
This means that without being able to take advantage of the things that the internet can provide, a modern business simply is not going to be able to succeed in the current era.
Even if that’s not the focus of your business as a whole, the online areas of your business are simply too important for you to ignore and require a great deal of time and effort to maintain.
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker
