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Digital Marketing - Tips for an outstanding website

June 2008

"There is no politness in today's age of internet savvy surfers. It's give me the information I want now, or I will find your competitor in a click".

If you are going to stay ahead of the game your site has got to be up to scratch.

Here are our tips for an outstanding website:

1. Design

Firstly, your site must reflect your branding and be relevant to your audience, use images that your customers can relate to and where possible use real product shots over stock photography.

Think about colour contrasts. White text on a black background tends to make you feel like you have had one too many. The general rule is a pale background colour with a dark font.

Use moving text or images sparingly, too much will detract attention from the content and cause a slow page download.

Make the most of your homepage. Research shows people spend literally seconds on a homepage before clicking on something else, so don't fill your homepage with lots of text that won't be read. Instead use feature boxes to draw attention and link through to the page you want your customers to see. Apart from our lovely homepage, other companies doing this well are British Airways and More Than.

2. Easy to use

Is your site easy to navigate? Can people find the information they want quickly? Is it easy to process an order?

User testing is key. Let a few people loose on the site and gather their feedback. Make sure you test with people outside of your organisation and be willing to make changes based on the feedback. A good idea is to test it with some of your top clients, most of them will be flattered at being given the opportunity to provide input, which has the knock on effect of building brand loyalty.

3. Content

Website content must grab the attention of the reader and focus on the benefits, have big calls to action and finally, be keyword rich to boost your search engine optimisation.

Make sure you use a language that is suitable for your audience. A common pitfall is jargon, and software companies are the main offender here. I won't name and shame but the usual scenario is that you find a piece of software and the first thing you see are the product specifications written in what could conceivably be a different language. This is all well and good for your IT guy who is going to install it but not for you the user who just wants to know how it is going to save you time and money by automating all your processes. If you're unsure get someone outside of your industry to read it, if they can understand you're doing ok.

Don't be ashamed to publish your prices. So many people don't publish their prices as they don't want to put people off. Think of it from another angle, it will save you time and eventually money. The leads you receive will know the cost and will be genuine, rather than a greater number of enquiries that run a mile once they find out the cost at the end of your sales pitch.

4. Search Engines

It's all very well having a wonderful website, but if no one can find it, it is useless. This subject is huge so we will feature search engine optimisation next month.

5. Accessibility

Ensuring your website can be accessed by disabled consumers is vital. Businesses are required by law to make their websites accessible - is yours?

This subject is fundamental to website design - read our article on website compliance for more information on this subject.

6. Monitoring

Once your site is live, don't let it get dusty. Build in Google analytics to track the site's success and use the results to make improvements - best of all this won't cost you a penny and is very easy to do.

You can track how many visitors you are getting, where there are coming from, what pages they are looking, what page they leave at - ideally you want this to be the purchase or contact us pages, perhaps if it's the delivery information page, they are being put off by your postage rates. There are hundreds more stats available and with a little effort you can make big improvements to your site.

Finally, with 8.5 billion websites on the web, once your site is built, people won't just come. Successful websites need to be marketed through a range of traditional and digital techniques that generate quality traffic to your site.