A website offers unmatched branding potential compared to other forms of digital media. Having a digital presence is vital for businesses looking to grow but being able to express your branding and share exactly what you want your customers to see is hard to do on many platforms. As a result, a website often becomes the ‘central hub’ for businesses, with their other digital efforts, such as social media, pointing back towards their website as a call-to-action.
Picture your website like a digital shopfront; you can showcase your branding, your design, and any messages that you want your customers to see. They get to know the real you and see the passion behind what you do, and you get to show them exactly what you want to. There are lots of digital forms of marketing, but the website is the one that gives this level of freedom.
That’s why a website is a great way of building rapport and trust with your audience and giving them the information that you want them to see.
Over the years, we’ve helped many businesses by building a professional website for their needs, and today, we’re going to share some of our top tips to help you improve your website.
In no particular order, here are our 7 great tips to improve your website today.
- Be clear about what you do AND how you can help
- Map out your visitor’s journey
- Make sure your branding is consistent across all pages
- Include multiple, relevant call-to-actions
- Use meaningful images and videos
- Make sure it works for mobile users too
- Keep it fresh!
1. Be clear about what you do AND how you help
Arguably the most important thing is clarity on a website. If people are on your website, it’s because they wanted to see something on your website. Therefore, it needs to be crystal clear exactly what you do, how you can help them, and most importantly, why they should want to buy from you.
If you only share what you do, you’re just informing them. If you go a step further and show them how you can help them, and why you’re the company to solve their problems, it helps to build trust with your visitor and makes them more likely to act on a call-to-action.
2. Map out your visitor’s journey
Your website should guide your visitors through a journey towards a call-to-action at the end, teaching them about what you do and the problems that you can solve. The goal is that as your visitor progresses through your website, they start intrigued, then interested, and ultimately invested in what you do, allowing you to present a call-to-action at the perfect time.
The goal here is to have a low amount of clicks for your visitors, and a clear, flowing journey, taking them straight to the call-to-action at the end. If you’re working on individual pages, it can often be hard to see the bigger picture and the flow of your visitors journey, which is why taking time to map out the route from when they load up your website to when they act upon a call-to-action can help you identify areas of improvement for your visitors’ experience.
3. Make sure your branding is consistent across all pages
As mentioned previously, your website should be thought of as your digital shopfront – it’s a blank canvas for you to promote and show exactly what it is you do. Therefore, you need to ensure that your branding is consistent across all pages to ensure your visitors get a good impression when browsing your website.
If not, it can harm your reputation and lead visitors to feel that your business may not be genuine or feel hesitant about staying on your website, making it a lot harder to get them to take that important call to action.
4. Include multiple, relevant call-to-actions
You may have noticed we’ve spoken about call to actions at every point so far, and there’s a good reason for that!
A website should aim to get customers to take that next step. It may be to contact you, to place an order, to book a call, or something else entirely; the key thing is to get people to take that action and move onto the next step of the journey to becoming a customer.
5. Use meaningful images and videos
Websites with images and videos are a lot better than websites without because it breaks up the text, allowing you to build sections of information with engaging images to draw your visitors’ attention.
However, the images and videos should be meaningful, rather than generic stock images, to really grab your visitor’s attention.
Instead of a stock photo, why not use a photo of you and your team? Or a video of you explaining the topic on the page? These are often more engaging than a stock photo, but they also give you the ability to build a more personal relationship with your visitors as they can see the people behind the business.
6. Make sure it works for mobile users too
Did you know that the majority of internet users access the web from their phones?
Despite the appetite for mobile users, most websites are still built and designed so that it looks good from a computer, rather than a mobile phone.
Head to your phone and load up your website – does it display clearly and easily on your phone? If not, making your website mobile-friendly may be a big improvement to make. It’s not an easy one, but a website that isn’t mobile-friendly can have a drastically negative impact on the user experience.
7. Keep it fresh!
The internet moves very quickly, and therefore keeping your website updated with the latest information and sharing new value is a great way of keeping return visitors interested and continuing to build that all-important trust with them. A lot of businesses don’t keep their website updated, which can lead to a lower quality website, confusing information, and a poor visitor experience.
How Weave Studios helps businesses
We understand how important your website is to you and how valuable it can be for your business, and we also know how long it can take to put together a professional-looking website.
Fortunately, we’re here to help.
Across the team, we have many years of experience in creating fantastic websites that our clients love. We take the time to understand your business in detail, as well as what you want to gain from your website so that we can create something to be truly proud of.
If you’re ready for a website that shows your customers why you’re the business they should buy from and serve your business correctly, contact our team today to start the conversation. We’ll be here!