Your website is your sales pitch to potential clients. The look and feel of your website are therefore vital to attract the target audience for your business. So, once you’ve ascertained that your website may need a little update, how should you go about finding a web design company in Croydon to help your business stand out in the online world?
Here’s our advice of what web design services you should cover off with your developer so that you can build a great website.
CMS
Build a bespoke website with a good Content Managed System (CMS). This means that once the website is built and with a little training, you can manage the upload of content yourself.
Easy navigation
Make sure the navigation and menu of your website are easy to read and navigate. Any page of importance should be no more than two clicks – preferably one click – from the homepage.
Using pillar pages will help you structure your site map. The titles of these pillar pages will also be the names of the URL. Really think about these as this is what you want to be found for. So, think carefully about your core offering so you can get this menu right at design stage.
Call to action buttons, strategically placed on pages will really help with engagement and your visitor’s movement around the website. As will white space. Don’t be too cluttered.
Content marketing
When you embark on creating your website it’s a great time to review your current collateral and what should be on the website and what shouldn’t. It can also highlight gaps that you need to fill. If you look at your competitors – how are they talking about their services? What’s missing from your website?
Optimise your website
Any agency you work with will tell you about Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags and H1/H2 headings. A web designer can provide you with simple training on this once your website has been developed. Or you can engage a digital marketing agency to manage this for you moving forward to improve your search results. This means they can keep an eye on your keywords for you. But this is for another blog. You can read more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Be visual
Images must not only be relevant, in focus and look good, they must also be optimised for your wordpress website. A developer should be doing this for you when they upload the images. This means they are the right size for the website and will help with the site speed by not being too large. These will also help with viability when sharing on social media such as Facebook and twitter
Research indicates that marketers using video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users (Source: Wordstream). Video is therefore great for engagement. Placing video toward the top of a page, so that it is seen straight away, has been known to keep visitors on pages longer.
Back up your website
Most CMS provide modules to allow you to back up and to make safe against hackers. Unfortunately, with web robots (automated programs) checking thousands of websites a second for weaknesses to exploit the owner it’s important to do as much as you can to make it safe. Talk through the options with your web developer such as the SSL certificate and captcha forms for your website.
Get your website seen
This is just a short overview. If you’d like to chat about your current website if you’re looking to design and build a new one or generally about design services in Croydon, get in touch today and our website designer and developer can look at the best options for your business and how we would work closely to get the best results for your online presence.
Web Design Croydon
Smart Cow is a top online marketing and web design agency in Croydon that fully understands your requirements and provides user friendly websites and professional web design for accountants and local businesses at affordable prices.