Things To Consider: Developing A Website In Bradford
Responsive
You’ll know yourself that people don’t just browse the Internet at home on their desktops. They’re sat on trains using their laptops, walking around browsing on their mobile phones, at their friend’s house shopping on a tablet. Your website has to react to all these devices, fitting all the various screen sizes and adapting the styling and content to fit. Your website has to be a responsive design in order to compete in the market and keep up to date with technology.
Navigation
Your web design agency will be able to advice you on making your website SEO friendly using a structured sitemap. This also enhances the user experience, making sure your products/services are clearly shown and information on your website is easy to find. Make sure when developing a website that your logo links back to your homepage.
Clean Design
There is nothing worse than a cluttered, fussy website design. A modern, clean, concise look is much easier on the eye and will appeal more to your customers. If a customer lands on a cluttered website, chances are they will immediately leave to find a more appealing site (most likely to be one of your competitors!). So don’t give them this opportunity, grab their attention and hold it.
Audience
Know your audience. Know what they look for on a website, know how they navigate around a website and what appeals to them. If you run a therapy company, make sure you understand that your customers are most likely looking for calm, relaxing imagery and fonts with neutral soft colours, not bold flash imagery and bright headings!
Content
Use the same tone of voice throughout your website. Make sure that it is informative, as well as concise. The content on your website will also play a vital role in SEO. Google algorithms look at the content on a website, and how relevant that content is to a user’s search term – the more relevant, the higher you will rank. Make sure to consider this when writing the content for each page; speak to your marketing agency on how they can help with copywriting and SEO if you’re unsure on how to make it effective.
Focus
Keep focussed throughout the planning, design and development of your website on what purpose you are trying to serve. Is your website to provide information to your customers? Is your website there to sell your products? Keeping a clear focus on your website aims and objectives will allow the development to flow much easier.
Hosting
A good, relevant domain name will help with your SEO strategy. Make sure it is concise, professional and consistent throughout your email addresses to make it easier for your customers to contact you.
Imagery
Your imagery is there to sell your products and services, and is the closest thing you have to showing your customer in person. That means your images are everything. They should be professional and clean photographs that are appealing to the eye. Your images will say more about your products and services than your words, no imagery on your website is better than poor imagery!
Call To Action
Your call to action should be clear and preferably in the top portion of your website. This should be consistent throughout your website. The top portion (above the fold) is the part of your website immediately seen by your audience, without them having to scroll. So make your call to action easy to see and stand out to them – make it easy for them to get in touch with you!
Test and Test Again
Test your website across all devices and on all browsers. You want to make sure it is consistent, if your audience goes onto your website on their mobile and it doesn’t work very well you will lose them as a customer immediately. So test, and then test again just to be sure!
