New Website Design
[01]
First Impressions
Bearing in mind the above and the impatience of web surfers, your home page needs to load fast, sock your visitor between the eyes and entice him to look further into your website.
Clean design with a single large message or a striking image is more eye-catching to most people (those over 13 at least) than any amount of clever animation and special effects. It's also a good deal less annoying when you come back for the second or third time!
[02]
Easy Navigation
Navigation is the process of getting from the page you're looking at to the one you want to look at, and it can make or break your website.
Visitors should be able to see quickly what pages there are, get a hint about what's on them and then get there quickly. A single drop down menu system (as on this site) gives them a picture of the whole site with a single sweep of the mouse (or finger - don't forget smart-phones). For larger sites a search facility is handy.
[03]
Search Engines
Of course all of that effort is wasted if no-one ever visits your website so it needs to be attractive to search engines as well as human visitors.
Search engines like words. They can't read pictures or graphics, just words. So we'll make sure the right words appear in the right places on your web pages - in the titles, the headings, the body text... but not too often of course - just like you search engines don't like to be patronised!
[04]
Updates
Another thing that search engines like is a website that is kept up to date - with frequent changes and new material.
Our content management system, PanPage, can help here and make it easy to update your website yourself. Adding a new paragraph about a contract you've just won or a photo of a new product is a matter of a few minutes. But if you really are too busy for a bit of DIY we'll be happy to keep your site updated for you - just pick up the phone or drop us an email.
[05]
Review & Refine - Website Statistics
An often overlooked part of your website is the visitor statistics package, but this is what tells you how well your website is working. We set up Google Analytics on all our websites, including the content managed sites. This tells you not only how many visitors your site has had but where they came from, which pages they looked at, how long they stayed, even, if they came from a search engine, what search phrase they used to find you.
If your website is your salesman then Google Analytics is your marketing team.
