While the advent and growth of social media provides you with a community, websites are still the homebase of your brand and should always communicate your story in ways that drive action. However, a nice looking website is not enough. There are many seen and unseen website development tools that help drive the best engagement from your users. In the new year, make sure your website has the following 8 tools:
Mobile First Design
Over 80% of website visitors now come from mobile devices. When designing your site, have a mobile-first mindset. With mobile sites, you have less real estate to get your point across. Whether you’re building as an influencer or corporation, keep this question in mind: “What should I communicate with my user when they first come to my site?” Save the unnecessary bells and whistles and grab the attention of your reader so that they are compelled to continue scrolling and learning more about your brand.
Once your mobile site map is developed, you can then use this to design a desktop site that could take advantage of the increased real estate afforded to larger screens.
Many themes and developers have moved to responsive websites that change shape no matter the screen size. These are useful, but still may require additional coding to ensure the experience is right, not just present, for all screens.
Concise Menu
No matter if they are a new or returning user, the menu is the hub that all visitors venture to for your information. Make sure your pages’ contents are structured in a way that your menu can stay concise. What are the too p 3-6 pages you’d like for your user to navigate to? If you have a lot of content which requires your categories to have subcategories, accordion menus allow you to keep a clean and concise look while providing your user with all necessary content.
Email Subscription Button & Area
Email is one of the most important assets for digital marketing. While you want to engage a community and find new people on social media, email marketing is where you control a more personal relationship with your users, increasing chances for sales, brand loyalty and more.
‘Back to Top’ Button
A highly overlooked small feature that gives BIG results. When you have a lot of content or maintain a blog, users will continue to scroll down your page. Save them scrolling time by adding a “back to top” button on the right side of your screen. One click saves almost 5-6 seconds of scroll, which grants more time for users to spend browsing your site. Many people miss this because 5-6 seconds of scrolling may seem trivial, but not having this button attributes to the decline of three major digital analytic points: your bounce rate, time spent on pages and pages visited per visit.
An About Page
People need to know who you are. You need to have one and you should make it fun. Instead of the regular bio or company history, how can you use this page and your story to entice people to take action? Write an unconventional bio via a story. Include your team or some blog posts or an email subscription on the page.
A Clean SEO Markup
The largest mistake website owners make is completing the website and then paying attention to SEO. In truth, your SEO strategy should start at the same time as your website mockup. Each page and post that you create should intentionally follow a focus keyword and a set of secondary keywords. This allows search engines to pick up your website, which gains your organic traffic.
Tools such as Yoast SEO are great for managing page-by-page SEO settings and guiding you on creating better copywriting that increases your search chances.
Also, submitting your website to Google Webmasters is a great way to tell Google exactly how you would like people to see your website on search engines.
You should definitely hire experienced webmasters (like us) or take SEO courses to ensure success.
Call to Actions on Multiple Pages
A Call to Action (CTA) is a button on a page or post that drives people to take action via a form submission on a landing page. These are very important for those who have services pages or blogs with a mission to gain customers or readers.
Tracking & Analytics Codes
To make the most out of your website, you want to ensure you have the necessary tracking and analytics codes added. Many search engines and social media companies have ‘pixels’ that can match the users who came to your site with their social media or website browsing experience, allowing you to create social and display ads to bring them back to a specific website page
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