1. Get the basics right:
As soon as a customer visits your website, it should be immediately clear who you are and what services or products you provide. It’s a pretty simple tip that is surprisingly forgotten. Take a look at a website featured on the Giraffe Social Media blog – “TagBak”.
The home page for TagBak
You may or may not know much about TagBak, but immediately you can tell who they are and what the service is they provide. But they haven’t given the whole game away, once you know what they offer, you are invited to scroll down to learn more about how it works. This is massively important, as Nielsen Norman Group suggests:
“Users often leave Web pages in 10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer”
It would seem that a 10 – 20 second time frame is absolutely key in keeping people interested in your web page.
2. Content is King!
Creating a website that looks amazing is great, but if it’s full of poor, irrelevant content then current and potential customers aren’t going to come back any time soon. Creating a blog that covers topics relevant to your industry, is a great way to get people interested and coming back for more. Much like we do here at Giraffe, our passion is social media and we love creating content about it, and hopefully it shows!
3. Be Mobile Friendly
With more and more people using their phones to browse the internet, it makes sense to have a website that operates well on a mobile browser. It’s quite frustrating heading on to a site on your phone to then have to zoom in, out and swipe back, forth and sideways to read the content. A mobile optimized website also gives the impression that you are technologically sound and know what you’re doing.
Dove Men Care – A great example of a mobile ready site
4. Less is More
Back in the days of Myspace and Geocities websites (if anyone remembers!) stumbling into a company profile on either one of these was a pretty scary experience. You’d be instantly hit with a page full of flashing banners and tiled animations running across the entire screen and music would blare out of your speakers! Great then perhaps, but not now.
Things have changed a lot since and websites have become simpler and easier to use. Although you don’t have to completely eliminate any flash animation or music, it sometimes works well if you know the audience you’re aiming for. For example, a heavy flash animation based website will take a long time to load on slow internet connections, so using this for a rural village community website wouldn’t be the best of ideas.
5. Placement of important bits!
Open up a few websites and you’ll notice that most of them will have their logo or important information in the top left hand corner. Why? Because naturally, your eyes are drawn to the top left corner of the page, it’s much like reading a book.
It’s also a good idea to have the menu in the form of tabs, running across the top of the page as it will be something you can fix on all your pages for easy navigation and again, have the most important links running from left to right. Make sure your menu or at least a link to the homepage is visible on every page of your website as once a user reaches a dead end, the natural reaction is to close the page.
