4 Key Features Your Business Website Needs! | Simplemachine
The Web is chock-full of terrible websites, not just from a design standpoint but also from a functional and customer-friendly aspect. This type of shoddy website craftsmanship leads to lost revenues poor testimonials, bad feedback and an overall concerning customer experience. Don’t be that guy. It is up to you to make your website stand out from the competition. Luckily, there are four main areas that every business can implement to their website to keep the customers coming back for more! These include:
One: Promo Slider
A promo slider is a fixed button on the corner of the website that slides out of place to promote critical content when clicked. Once the mouse is moved away, the slider navigates nicely back from the featured content. Promo sliders have become ubiquitous in modern website design because they are easy to set up, completely customizable to the needs of your website and showcase creative content while utilizing a small footprint. You can tell a compelling story in a small package while promoting numerous elements of your business with a simple site element. When executed properly, sliders are visually-pleasing and can provide a punch to any website.
Promo sliders are easiest to add to WordPress websites but can be added in any format. The best type of websites to utilize promo slides include product tours where a large amount of information is presented, when highlighting new content, for photo gallery sites and in online portfolios. Also, promo sliders are an excellent part of the e-commerce website design that helps showcase a range of products or a select few to communicate new additions. Sliders ease users into reading since the text feels and appears small and manageable instead of reading through pages of endless information.
Two: Responsive Design
All website owners want their site to be read on multiple formats in order to reach the largest community of potential customers. Responsive design does exactly that: creates a mobile version of the website. With more users than ever accessing the Internet via mobile device, implementing responsive design is critical to the continued success of any business. The practice of responsive design mixes layouts, flexible grids, images and intelligent use of CSS media. When the user switches from their PC laptop to their iPad, the website automatically switches to accommodate the image size, scripting abilities and resolution.
In addition to cross-platform readability, responsive website design has numerous benefits. First, with more than half of Internet traffic deriving from mobile devices, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to display websites that render on multiple devices which increases overall traffic. Second, creating responsive websites consumes significantly less time than creating a stand-alone mobile application and standard desktop site. As a result, less money is spent when using responsive website design. Third, mobile users have a short attention span; this practice allows for faster websites due to quicker loading speeds. Fourth, businesses are experiencing lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates due to improved user experience. Fifth, responsive website design is critical to search engine optimization as being deemed quality content. Finally, the monitoring process used by analytics tools is greatly improved to pinpoint the source of traffic based on location, device and a variety of other factors.
Three: SEO
Your website is pointless if no potential customers can find it. Studies show that organic searches are the primary source of website performance, so a solid SEO strategy and implementation is critical. By implementing even the basics of SEO into your website design, you can reach ions of organic potential customers via search engines. It is not necessary to employ ninja, black hat, and mysterious SEO tricks to rank on search engines. It is as simple as utilizing the target keywords throughout the content, adding a variety of relevant links, utilizing proper naming conventions on page titles and URL’s, and enchanting your website with images and videos.
In addition to allowing customers to find your website, SEO creates trust and credibility through a beautiful website design with effective user experience in a clean environment. The most common factors for developing an authoritative reputation include quality backlinks, machine-learning signals, positive user behavior, and optimized on-page content and elements.
There are a variety of webmaster tools available through Google and other search engine browsers to help find keywords, spit out reports and confirm the analytics of your site. There are also SEO companies available who can rank your website at the top during searches using the aforementioned tactics as well as more advanced premium SEO tools.
Four: Social Media Integration
Have you ever seen a “follow us on Facebook” widget at the end of a blog or digital articles? This is social media integration which allows you to cross-promote your channels to increase usage frequency. There are widgets available for all of the major social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. Social media integration is so critical to implement during website design because it allows you to extend your branding and marketing efforts by leveraging social media channels.
Consumers enjoy a variety of communication types, so it is important to cater to all preferences. Without these specific platforms, the reputation and authority of your website can be viewed poorly. One of the greatest benefits to the consumer is the ability to click the widget and paste immediately to their channel of choice. Visitors have the ability to utilize all interactions in a single destination: your website. The best social media integration tools will provide a variety of analytics to determine how well your social media efforts are working. Furthermore, these widgets allow you to expand your network of potential consumers and spread news, promos, sales, or updates quickly.
Business websites are constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the latest and greatest technology that helps bring the world closer and gives you access to more consumers than ever before. With so many poor sites floating along on the Internet, you want to be ahead of the curve and make your website stand out with promo sliders, responsive design for use on all platforms, clean coding with plenty of SEO into the website design and social media integration.
For more information on creating and implementing these four ideas on your website, contact Simplemachine today!
