A website that catches the eyes of the viewer also has to have good content and well-organized information. A website is successful only when it can convince its viewers to take action towards achieving their goals.
For instance, you might have a trendy layout, colorful theme that displays your latest Instagram posts, but this isn't necessarily contributing to your website success. Instead, you might wish to take a closer look at if your website has easy-to-use navigation, effective and clean design? Does your web page have the search-engine-optimized text and a user-friendly web address?
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Among many other elements that make up a good website, here are a few of the basic ones:
Web Design
The first thing that people will see if they feel pleasant and less stressful while on your site. Can they quickly find what they are looking for? The placement of each component, like photos, content, etc. determines how well you have designed your website.
Make your homepage pleasant to look at. Your website design style should be modern and professional. A clean, easy-to-use homepage is just as important as meaningful content.
Spend a good time planning out how you want your homepage to look. If it's not something you would want to look at, chances are potential customers won't want to look at it, either.
What you can do: The key to designing a good website is to keep the content evenly spaced. A cramped website looks unpleasant and is not very appealing to the viewers, either. Also, when you are planning to add an image in between texts, make sure you border it with a little spacing.
Navigation
Always keep simple navigation for your website, unless it is only made for the tech-savvy audience. People often make the mistake of adding too many options on the menu, thinking it would help the audience quickly get through each link. But usually, the case is different. More options mean that the user will get confused between the options.
If your site is hard to navigate, you'll lose visitors. Make sure your menus are easy to understand and use.
What you can do: Keep a minimum number of menus on your website, say around 4-6. These can be the links to the prime pages, like About Us, Product, Service, Contacts page. Further, these pages can be internally link or divided into more sections.
About Yourself
The "About Us" page is one of the most important pages of your website because this page tells your customers who you are and whom they are doing business.
"About Me" or "About Us" or "About" page help you to build trust and form connections with visitors.
What you can do: Talk about yourself or your company and mention your aims, objectives, and values. Mention everything important about you but only facts.
Make sure no hype, no vague clams, offer pure transparent information, that will help your site visitor to build trust with you.
Copywriter Susan Greene offers some helpful advice about what to include in the About page.
Contact Page
At one point, your website visitors will want to contact you or your team if they like your products or services. Even if you mention everything in detail, they would like to know something or the other and get in touch with you. You must keep your contact information updated.
It will be a good idea to have a contact form, email, and phone number readily visible. If you are a physical store or address where people can walk in, then adding Google map directions will help.
What you can do: Add the necessary information to your contact page and respond back to inquiries on time.
CTA or Call to Action
If you want your audience to download the app, buy the product, signup for service or newsletter, or contact you, the best way to get desired results - use a Call to Action button. Place it at a prime location, where it is difficult to miss by the visitors or add content in such a way that it leads the people to the button to take action.
What you can do: Make attractive buttons and place them on your website at places irresistible to the eyes of the visitor.
High-Quality Images
Images are the best way to keep the interest of your audience intact. If the photos are not of good quality, the viewers will not be attracted to the website. The low-quality image reflects the carelessness in the website design process. It is also essential to use authentic and context-sensitive pictures on the website.
For example, if your website is made for the Indian audience, use Indian faces on the site than stock photos of western faces.
What you can do: If you are sail products, then use high-resolution photos of products shoot specifically for your website. For that, either hire a professional photographer or to take pictures using HD cameras. If you are using stock photos, make sure images are copyright free, or you have proper permissions.
Here are a few places you'll find fantastic photos free of charge at Unsplash.com, Pixabay.com, and Picjumbo.com.
Now that you have everything in place and ready to go live, here are the last few things you should pay attention.
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Final tests before you launch
Before you click "Publish" on your new website, run a few final tests to ensure that everything is in working order.
- Forms - Test your contact, download, and newsletter forms to make sure they're working correctly.
- Site speed - No one likes a slow website! Test your site speed with a free tool like Google Page Speed to see how you can improve its loading time for desktop and mobile websites.
- Mobile optimization - Don't blindly trust that your theme is optimized for mobile viewing. Use your smartphone or tablet to view your website via mobile and pinpoint any trouble areas.
- Links - Double-check outgoing links to ensure they direct correctly, and they are interlinked.
Everything looks great. Go Live!
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Do you wish to save some time on effort on this checklist, let Budo do that task for you?
How choosing Budo will help you.
Budo is the simplest website builder developed for freelancers and small business owners to go live quickly and effectively.
Budo takes care of everything mentioned above.
An easy-to-use interface that helps you do everything on your own so that you don't need to take any assistance from professionals.
- Budo's Menu and Sub-Menu module is designed to create the most straightforward and effective navigation for your website.
- Budo's Pages module is the heart of the application, which lets you create 100s of unique layouts only for your website. So you don't need to use the same templates thousand others are using.
- You can add a blog to your website effortlessly without depending on any third party blog application.
- Use the Photos module to create beautiful photo galleries.
- Header feature lets you quickly make an engaging header for your website.
- Use the default contact page to quickly add all necessary information and google map on your website.
- Most importantly, every website created with Budo is fast, mobile-friendly, search engine optimized, and tested for the latest browsers.
Don't trust our words, try for yourself, get your lifetime website free here.