9 Tips for Building a Better Website

Your website is often the first impression your business makes on new and existing clients. This is where you share the value of your new or improved products or services and the positive impact you are having on your clients and the industry you serve. Your website represents your brand and the platform for clients to place orders. It links to your social media presence, which drives greater traffic to your site and ultimately greater sales.  

Taking the time to evaluate your existing website to determine how you can improve it will allow you to expand your reach of potential clients. Start by evaluating how visually appealing it is. Does it represent your brand well? Have you clearly communicated your message across your website? Do your pages load quickly? Does your website connect to your social media presence? If the answer is no, it may be time to build a better website. 

Here are nine steps to build a better website. If your budget allows, you may want to consider hiring a web designer to help you.  

1. Keep it simple.

Website improvement starts with the home page. Your home page clearly communicates what your business is, what products or services you offer, and who you and your team are. Include pictures of yourself, your team, and your business so visitors can feel they're getting to know you. Think about how you engage with a website: do you read it like a book? You most likely read it quickly. Therefore, embrace the power of white space and limit the amount of text around images. 

2. Ensure your website is optimized for all devices.

Visitors might find your website via their laptop, tablet and/or mobile phone. Each device has a different screen size. Therefore, you'll need to build a website that can engage with all devices. Responsive websites automatically adjust to seamlessly fit the screen size of a laptop, tablet, smartphone, or any other device your website could be accessed from. You want to be sure all visitors have a great experience regardless of the device they use. 

3. Content is king.

Once visitors find your site, you want to keep them there. You can build a better website by telling a compelling story about who you are, what you do, and how you distinguish yourself from your competitors with informative, concise content. Use appropriate and consistent colors, fonts, and high-quality images and videos.

Your website is often the first impression your business makes on new clients. Taking the time to evaluate your existing website to determine how you can improve it can allow you to expand your reach of potential clients.

You can start by evaluating your "About Us" page. If you don't have one, build one. Share who you are, your mission or vision statement, and high-quality images of you and your team. Display your social media channels clearly on the home page to encourage users to follow you. Also include a contact us page that shares your address, phone number, and email address.

4. Optimize site load times.

The time it takes to access your site is an important part of ensuring a great visitor experience. If your site takes too long to load, your visitors may lose patience and leave before they can learn why you're exactly the business they should engage.

You can measure page load time with free tools such as Google's PageSpeed Insights or the DebugBear Speed Test. Just enter your website URL for an analysis of your page speed metrics and get recommendations on how to optimize your website performance.

5. Improve inclusivity & accessibility.

When building a better website, it's important to be thoughtful about visitors who may have disabilities. Building an ADA (Americans with Disabilities)- compliant site is a great way to ensure you provide access to your entire audience. Additionally, this can help visitors with slower network connections and improve the mobile experience. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) is an organization with a commitment to promoting usability for people with disabilities and offers guidelines.

6. Organize your site well.

Improve your website by producing a positive online navigational journey. This can be accomplished by creating an inviting site that has a well-thought-out navigation bar with content that becomes more specific as visitors dive into the subsections under each main section. It also should have clear call to actions with working links. Clean, uncluttered web pages that allow your visitors to easily find information and navigate can encourage them to stay on your site longer.

7. Shorter can be better.

Take a look at your site's content and ask: Is my content too verbose? Are my headlines engaging? Have I designed my content to be scannable with bullet points and links that take my visitors to helpful content? It can help to take a break after drafting your updates and come back to finalize your changes, along with asking others for feedback.

8. Implement an SEO strategy.

When building a better website, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are strategies that can drive traffic to your site. SEO is focused on driving engagement through your content while SEM drives engagement through organic and paid search. 

SEO and SEM are highly specialized fields that can improve your website's engagement and visibility. You might consider qualified SEO and SEM professionals who know what they're doing and why they're doing it to ensure you're driving as much traffic as possible.

9. Find creative support.

As a busy small business owner, you may benefit from leveraging creative professionals, such as designers and copywriters, to help build a better website. This talent can be found by posting the creative projects you need assistance with on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, Upwork, People Per Hour, and 99 Designs. You can also leverage your LinkedIn network to find talented creative professionals.

The Takeaway

Website improvement is an ongoing task. Make it part of your practice to regularly evaluate your content to ensure it remains relevant and current. Make necessary changes to product information, business hours, and prices, along with updating articles and white papers as needed. By keeping your strategy consistent, you can keep visitors on your site longer, driving greater awareness and revenue for your business.

A version of this article was originally published on July 11, 2013.

Photo: Getty Images