What Makes a Good Website?

Believe it or not, but there’s a lot of planning and coordination that goes into making your website pop. It’s not all flashy logos and minimalist design. In fact, most of the behind-the-scenes functions of a website dictate how successful it is. Want to know what we here at LumberPress gauge a website’s potential? Here are a few key factors:

Stat Tracking

When you make a website, you have to know how it performs. That’s where statistic tracking comes in. If you aren’t looking at your stats, then you’ll never know the areas or pages you need to improve on. Without stats, it becomes a guessing game of randomized content and filler. And that’s a lose-lose for everyone. Step your website game up by keeping track of the raw data on the who what where when and why of your consumer base.

Mobile Friendly

Smartphones have changed the game of website design. People aren’t just looking at your site on their computers. In fact, we’re willing to bet that many potential clients are accessing your website from their phones. And that doesn’t play well if your website looks straight out of 2006 because you didn’t code it well mobile-side. It takes a lot of testing to accommodate mobile site usage, but we think it’s worth the wait. No one wants a dysfunctional website, and that goes for viewership coming from mobile and the computer. Either way, it’s best to have both covered.

SEO Readability

Let’s say you open a landing page and you see a dense paragraph with a bunch of buzzwords. You probably wouldn’t bother reading it. In fact, your first instinct might be to back out of the page entirely. There goes a potential client, all because your SEO wasn’t up to par. Keep your language simple. Tell the reader what you want, and how you plan on doing that. Consumers will be making snap judgments about your company based on nothing more than the copy and pictures you use. This can be a good thing--if you know what you’re doing. It can also be a nightmare if your homepage consists of words half the population can’t even pronounce.

Consistent Content

Know what screams good site rankings? Updating your content regularly. Search engines prioritize websites that not only have more than one page, but those that actively seek to add more to their brand. The more pages of quality content your site has, the better it’s going to look to clients. No one wants to go to a landing page and not be able to navigate anywhere else once they decide to purchase.

Quick Loading

Speaking of sales, let’s say you’ve got a customer who has looked over your site and has decided to buy. Well, you may very well have lost that customer if your site took too long to load the proper page. Keep track of how your sites load, and what you can do to optimize that process. People will get frustrated pretty easily, and once that happens, it’s a closer step to them giving up entirely on your business.

Outreach

So your site looks great; the back end is functioning and the front end is sleek and eye-catching. But now what? Well, all that work won’t mean a thing if you aren’t doing any outreach. We’re talking social media. Email. Promotion. Anything that will get your business out there. And when it’s the internet, that stuff can get lost pretty quickly in the heap of content that’s being produced and pushed every day. How do you stand out? Be consistent. Be pushy. Send an email. Send another. Tweet and retweet. It’s vital that your website doesn’t go unnoticed. But it’s also important you’re targeting your audience, or those calls will go unheard.

Security

No one is going to trust a site that says at the top left corner: not secure. It’s a fairly simple process to set up security for your website, and it’s just as easy for your customers to back out of your site when they see you have nothing to protect their information. If they want to trust you with their credit card, they’re going to want to see proof that you’re willing to take steps to protect it. Regularly update passwords, and keep your website under lock and key so consumers won’t second guess your site’s credibility.

Any of this making sense? We think so too. We’ve got all this and more, so come check us out at lumberpress.com. Schedule a consultation today!