How would you define a successful website if you had a business or an online ministry?
Don’t be tempted that having a stylish layout and vibrant colours is the definition of a successful website. Those things might just impress your close friends and family. You’ve got to consider that what you really want from the website is actually to get the business outcomes you desire.
Many businesses want websites that would generate sales and revenue for them online.
If your website is an educational or inspirational hub or a virtual storefront, it should perform well at attracting visitors, educating or inspiring them and if it’s an ecommerce site, then getting them to buy from you.
A website isn’t successful if no one visits it. If it’s an online shop, it isn’t successful if potential buyers cannot complete their transactions online without involving a sales person.
I listed below a few strategies to include in your business or ministry website that can make them stand out.
1. Design Layout and Easy Navigation
A successful website must have a good design and offer a great user experience. When you succeed in getting visitors to your site, you want them to stay there and navigate to other pages or parts of the site and maybe even contact you.
Your website should make a good first impression about the business or ministry. The visitors should know they are in the right place and feel that your site is professional in the set up.
Make it look good with your brand colours and don’t make the colours brash.
It isn’t professional to use flash animated text or background music. Only use such media if it supports your content.
A clear and easy navigation structure is essential in a modern responsive (mobile-friendly) website and it helps make sure information flows in an organised way. Help your website visitors find what they are looking for on your website.
Remember that content is king and that is what your visitors are ultimately after.
2. Fast Load Time and Images
Website visitors abandon a site if it fails to load in time. After a few seconds, they are off even before they see what your website has to offer. Having a quick load time is very important.
When images aren’t optimized on a website, it can affect the load time and not deliver a good user experience. Optimizing an image on your website is about reducing the file size while not losing quality.
Many modern websites use large image sizes, so it is essential to compress the file size so that it wouldn’t slow down your website page-loading time.
There are many online photo-editor websites with free online services to help you compress your image sizes. An online one that you can use is Pixlr.com. You can also use photo-editing software like Photoshop.
A professional website needs great-looking images in order for it to stand out. Remember to use good quality photos for your website.
WordPress has handy alternatives for re-sizing images, if you can’t use any of the ones mentioned above.
3. Responsive Website
Having a responsive (commonly known as mobile-friendly) website design is the latest technology trend. A responsive website is one that adjusts its layout to the size of the screen which displays it – Laptops, Tablets and Smart-phones.
Since you’d want to deliver a uniform browsing experience for your website visitors, it is smart to make your website responsive.
As most businesses expect majority of their online sales to come from mobile phones these days, I thought it necessary to include this very important strategy too.
Online shopping is continuing to grow year after year. Recent news reports states that businesses were still struggling to develop effective ‘user-friendly’ mobile websites.
Remember that your customers are mobile, so develop a mobile strategy and don’t get left-behind, and don’t let your website bring your brand down either.
A successful website is one that delivers online, what your business or ministry goals are off-line and successfully converts your site visitors to paying customers.
If you would like to bring your website ideas to life and boost your business or online ministry to get better outcomes and make your online presence easier, contact me.
