In the modern digital environment, businesses are pressed to elevate their website experience for their users. This means modernizing and integrating new development and design ideas and technology to make websites perform at their peak capabilities. Doing so will drive higher metrics and overall revenue through an improved user experience, competitive edge, and purposeful interactions designed to impact consumer actions. Internet marketing agency, fishbat, lists eleven characteristics of a successful website.
In the modern digital environment, businesses are pressed to elevate their website experience for their users. This means modernizing and integrating new development and design ideas and technology to make websites perform at their peak capabilities. Doing so will drive higher metrics and overall revenue through an improved user experience, competitive edge, and purposeful interactions designed to impact consumer actions. Internet marketing agency, fishbat, lists eleven characteristics of a successful website.
- Intuitive navigation Navigation struggles cause site abandonment. Design with intuitive navigation, arranging navigation by hierarchy, keeping navigation bars at the top of the fold where the user expects them, and by keeping navigation and menus visible as opposed to utilizing hamburger menus or other non-intuitive directives. Ensure navigation font is easy to read.
- Clear CTAs CTAs are important to direct users to complete actions such as joining an email list, generating leads, driving conversion, and more. Surround CTAs with borders, use bold and contrasting colors to make CTAs pop, include action verbiage to prompt user response, and keep CTAs above the fold.
- Updated and relevant content Content is a major factor is building brand awareness, social proof, improving SEO, and driving traffic to your site. It also provides additional user-value to the website. Ensure that content is regularly updated to stay current, on trend, and relevant. Ensure that content has unique URLs and titles for easy sharing. Consider important keywords, trending industry news and more when updating shareable website content.
- Simple forms and checkout processes For lead generation, e-commerce, and more, ensuring that forms and checkout process are simple, quick, and intuitive will help to retain users and drive conversion and repeat traffic. Limit forms to essential information only, ensure multiple payment options are available to encourage higher conversion rates and ensure that the checkout process is simplified with features such as auto-fill. Also, don’t require customers to “join” before allowing them to complete actions such as purchasing, which will turn a large number of potential customers away. Instead, offer the option after the transaction is complete. Additionally, include trust badges and security seals to boost consumer trust. On e-commerce sites, also consider perpetually visible shopping carts and options to save shopping carts for later purchasing to drive-up conversion.
- Uncluttered design Cluttered designs confuse users and mask important website elements such as navigational elements, CTAs, value propositions, and more. Keep designs clean, balanced, and prioritized. Use minimal but impactful visuals such as photos and videos, limit ads and avoid sidebars.
- SEO optimization Your site won’t be very successful if consumers can’t find you or if when they do, the site performs poorly. It’s essential to focus on SEO to drive organic traffic, satisfying interactions, and to establish social proof. Include goal-driven keywords in titles, headers, sitemaps, content and more. Ensure that all images and content are compressed, titled, and contain a unique URL. Maintain clean-code, working quality links, title-tags for website pages, and an accurate sitemap. Obtaining website maintenance will help to ensure that there are no loading-slowing issues in coding that need to be addressed.
- Quick functionality and a quality hosting server Utilize a quality hosting service and obtain website maintenance services regularly to ensure that sites load quickly and function well. Slow loading is a leading cause of user bounce rates and frustration. Tasks such as image compression, code cleanup, link checking, and more will improve site functionality for better retention, social proof, and conversion.
- Social sharing capabilities Social media platforms drive consumer awareness and traffic to brands. Ensure that your website includes social sharing buttons as well as titles and unique URLs on all images, pages, and shareable content.
- Readability Faint font that blends into the website background, small or cramped font, or ultra-flourishy font can be difficult for users to read, especially on mobile devices. Use a font that is bold enough and large enough to be easily read on smaller screens.
- Mobile responsiveness Design with a mobile-first mentality. Most users use their mobile devices as their primary source of online interactions. They also visit the digital environment more frequently throughout the day on mobile versus desktop. This means that optimizing for a mobile-responsive site is of paramount importance.
- Conversational AI More and more brands are leveraging the power of new technologies such as conversational AI and deep machine learning. Conversational AI, such as chatbots or more advanced natural language processing bots, help to deliver exceptional 24-hour service with minimal overhead. Conversational AI can also assist with sale-building, customer follow-up, and recovery, and in more advanced forms of the technology, even human context deciphering for more customized and relevant returns. Deep machine learning will also help to provide more qualified solutions for consumers through information gained from historical online interactions, interests, and more.
Your website is the face of your business that you present to the audience; it makes sense to invest the time and effort into doing it right. Business websites and digital interactions make up more and more of the overall revenue sources for brands, and that is a growth pattern that will continue. Ensuring that your business site is set up for success will help you win in the digital marketplace.
Contact fishbat Web Design Long Island NY at 855-347-4228 for a cost-free consultation.
