One day your website is an all singing all dancing piece of technical brilliance and the next, it’s less so. Is your website regularly updated or stuck in the dark ages?
Everyone wants to own the best website on the World Wide Web and, while it is subjective as to what makes the best website; it is easy to spot one that is dated. While this is not to say that you have to make constant changes to your website each and every day – if anything this would be counterproductive – you should at least look to review your site every six months.
What are your Competitors Doing?
This is a question that you should be asking yourself when it comes to designing or redesigning your website. An even more important question to ask is what are your competitors doing that is working?
Is it a case that their website is much more user friendly? How quickly can you achieve your objective (i.e. selecting a product and checking out)?
Look at a handful of your best performing competitors (at least three or four) and note down any recurring features and tick off those that your website has and doesn’t have. This will give you a good starting point before drawing up a new blueprint for how your site should look.
Stay Away from Generic WordPress Designs
WordPress is the most SEO friendly platform available, but stay away from using generic themes that thousands of websites and blogs use. This does not look great for your brand, which will not have a signature image.
If possible, employ a professional to design a sleek looking WordPress website from scratch if this is not your area of expertise. Discuss what it is you are looking for from your website, what your competitors are doing. A professional, whether freelance or agency, will be able to offer advice on some of the latest trends in web design that will improve your websites functionality and search engine optimization.
Code like a Pro
The best way to keep your website or blog up to date is to know what you are actually looking at when you look into the HTML of each page. Many website owners rely on the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors as they do not understand code.
Learning code is a lot like learning another language, so looking into a beginner’s guide is a good place to start. Even though you might not have a need for this on a day-to-day basis, this will make installing small updates, and correcting errors, ten times easier.
Quality Content
Does your website feature pages of short text with lots of white space? If the answer is yes, rectify this immediately. Search engines do not look favourably on such page as they offer no real value, look poorly designed and are not properly optimized.
Try and include at least 200 words of quality copy on most pages, making use of keywords while not stuffing them in like so many webmasters make the fatal mistake of doing. Ensure that any content that you publish is unique – do not just copy and paste from another page, as this can cause the page not to be indexed by search engines on the basis it fails to offer anything new.
As well as text, also make use of images and videos as these are great for SEO purposes, especially with the correct use of the ALT tag. Rich media can be used to break up heavy amounts of text, improving the user experience, and is great for those visiting your website on mobile devices. Images and videos can better represent your brand than text on smaller devices.
BISWAJIT SAHA says
Thanks for sharing such great info!
Monika Sharma says
Hi Bashir,
Thanks to you for sharing this nice article about Website. I’m happy that I got a amazing idea for my website that should be update.