A website is crucial to the success of most enterprises these days. It’s one of the most powerful solutions against low sales at physical stores. Likewise, it offers affordable long-term marketing.
So if you still don’t have one, you better get cracking because you’re not doing business right if you’re not doing business online.
Building a website is best entrusted to the professionals. They have the technical skills to make sure that the website performs well for your business. Likewise, they can provide you a great collection of advice on how to effectively manage your online presence. Suffice it to say, if you want a high performing website, it’s best not to attempt the DIY route.
However, if you wish to learn the fundamentals of building a website – just to make sure that your official online presence has the right components for success – here are six principles on how to build a website.
- It’s crucial to identify your target user. Study and understand the people who will use your website. Make sure you know the following variables about them.
- Age range
- Economic level
- Educational background
- Gender
- Lifestyle
- Occupation and others
These will allow you to incorporate the most appropriate design components to your website and ensure your users’ engagement.
- A good domain title is a must. It should automatically inform people about your business brand. It’s a win for your business if, from your domain name alone, people already know what to expect from the site.
- Your choice of platform will contribute to success. Choose a platform based on cost, SEO friendliness, and its ability to grow along with your business.
- Responsive is the way to go. Most internet users these days consume information online through their mobile devices. So, if you wish to net more people into your business through your website, it’s imperative to make it responsive. Don’t bother with a mobile-switched site; use a responsive website design so your website displays clearly and properly on the mobile devices people prefer to use for their online activities.
- Website design has to be smart. Pay great attention to your background. “Clean and simple” remains to be the smartest option when it comes to background and layout because it makes navigation (engagement) so much easier. Less is more with this design concept, and not less is boring – keep the pages clean, but with special and useful features that can contribute to overall user experience.
Integrate the following design components as well because these will help with conversion:
- Product and services display
- Product and services description
- Video and images to complement written posts
- Social proof
- Typography
- Finally, the page-loading speed keeps users happy. Web pages should load under three minutes; otherwise, you could lose your audience. Page-loading speed is a determinant of how trustworthy a site is. It important to mention as well that most people are so impatient that if a website doesn’t display properly in three seconds, they will promptly click X.
