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I think we can all agree that the main goals of setting up a professional website are:
To increase awareness or showcase products/services
To attract new customers
To engage customers
To generate leads and
To get conversions
But right from the functionality and appearance of a website to the navigation, a lot of effort must be put into creating a striking and user-friendly website that can also be easily found by search engines.
Hope you've already gone through the main points mentioned in the Part 1 and Part 2 of this 3-part blog series. Next we'll see what are the important things needed to be taken into factor, in the final stages of a website design.
9. Website that functions 24/7
It goes without saying that every page on your site should work 100% of the time. The greater the downtime, the greater the loss for your business.
A normal business hour for a company may be eight hours. But when it comes to managing a website, it needs to work around the clock since everything on the internet is accessible anytime, anywhere around the world.
A company may have visitors or online clients, and customers who live on the other side of the world. Technical issues can’t be scheduled. It has to be resolved promptly. So whether your website is experiencing troubles during working hours or outside working hours, you can lose traffic and credibility when the issue doesn’t get resolved immediately.
Serving customers without any delay is the key to success for any business. Especially when it comes to customers/clients, they want complete and unhindered accessibility to support.
Businesses should ensure that they don’t allow geographical boundaries or time zones to come in between provision of support.
So in case of an issue, you should have some sort of 24-hour support system implemented to ensure immediate redressal.
10. Mobile-responsive or at least Mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendly vs Mobile-responsive website
A mobile-friendly site is mobile-optimized, whereas a responsive site is mobile-first.
A responsive site reacts to the device it is viewed on. For example, a desktop site may have a multi-column layout, which a mobile-friendly site may have on a smaller scale so users can see everything without having to scroll. But a responsive site will have a single-column layout that translates better to a smaller screen.
Mobile-friendly sites make the entire site fit on the screen. Whereas Mobile-responsive sites create a high-quality user experience on all devices.
To improve search rankings, the best practice is to build a responsive website so that Google identifies your website as user-friendly to mobile searchers.
51% of global web traffic originates from mobile devices
Having at least a mobile ready website, is one of the surest ways to ensure success of your site. You want to ensure that your design is optimized for how images, text, logos, and other elements will appear on smaller screens since many of your visitors will be accessing your site from a tablet/cell phone.
Users prefer websites that are mobile responsive
Majority of mobile users admit that if they visit a company’s webpage that doesn’t work on their mobile device, they take it as an indication that the business simply doesn’t care.
If you have a desktop only website, chances are you probably aren’t ranking very well to begin with. Either way, your website will still eventually be ranked and indexed with mobile-first indexing, as the desktop version of your site is the mobile version of your site.
11. Bug Testing
Test yourself. Don’t just rely on others
Take some time to test out your website and its functionality. You’ll get to see first-hand what problems your customers could face as they try to navigate your site.
Send people to your site once everything works 100%
Redirecting people to your site before it has been thoroughly tested out is just a bad website strategy. Also, you’d not want to pay good money to send well-targeted traffic to your website, only to discover that many of them bounced right off of it because they had trouble navigating it or using the systems within it.
12. Website Analytics
Using analytics is a great way to help your business grow. A lot of people don’t realize that they can use services like Google Analytics to see things like what buttons visitors are clicking on the most, where the most traffic is coming from (Social Media, Referrals etc.), and how long people are spending on the site.
The data you receive from such services can be an extremely valuable asset and also helps you understand what changes you can make to your site to bring in more targeted traffic, and to make the user’s experience more enjoyable, and ultimately, get more people to take advantage of your amazing products and/or services.
So, by keeping all these 12 points in mind, business owners from all industries can increase their chances of a successful website project, ensuring their needs are met and that the overall design supports their business goals.
Having said all that, for many businesses it might still be difficult to do all this, because a lot of them simply don’t have the resources and skills to build a website themselves. For them there’s always the option of paying a developer to do this for them and freelancers to create appropriate content for the site or hiring a company who specializes and provides web designing and web development services.
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