Today’s worldwide web is a competitive place. The websites with the best designs are the ones that will work their way up to the top of the rankings, leaving the rest to trail in their wake. In this post, learn eight key website development tips to help your reseller hosting website successfully compete for a top of the page ranking.
Tip 1: Write each web page for the widest possible audience.
Unless your market is strictly college literature professors or Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, you will want the content on your website to be highly accessible, readable and digestible for the widest possible audience.
What to do: Use the Flesch-Kincaid reading score analysis to determine whether your writing is accessible for the majority of the population.
Tip 2: Plan out your site navigation in advance.
For all but the most complex of websites (think Amazon, iTunes, et al), you want your site navigation to be reliable enough to ensure your web visitors get to where a) they want to go or b) you want them to go in short order.
This is called “site navigation” and it refers to what happens between the time when a web visitors lands on your website and when they leave.
What to do: Get out your pen and paper (or your word processing program) and draw yourself an actual map of your site. What are the main menu buttons going to say? Will you have any sub-pages or hidden pages? Where do you most want the majority of your web visitors to go before they leave your site and how can they get there quickly?
Tip 3: Be sure your new website is optimized for all screen sizes.
Your website should essentially display and function the same on all devices. This is not only important because Google rankings give mobile-friendliness high marks in browser results, but because in recent years more web visitors are browsing from mobile devices (an estimated 1 out of every 10) than ever before.
What to do: Use Google’s free Mobile Friendliness Test tool to determine if your new website’s theme and navigation is mobile-friendly.
Tip 4: Make your content web-optimized and visual.
Image-rich content will deliver more interest and the possibility of higher click-throughs than text-heavy content. Marketing research is very clear about the importance of visual-based content such as infographics, photos, graphics, memes and other eye-catching visual tools to enticing web visitors to stay longer on any site. Graphics should also be web-optimized (small size with high resolution).
What to do: Start paying attention to what grabs your attention online. Which images catch your eye? What images would be most relevant to web customers shopping for reseller hosting? You can also use A/B testing combined with site analytics to determine whether a graphic is effective in enticing your visitors to remain and interact with your site.
Tip 5: Be sure your site is consistent throughout.
If you’ve spent a long enough period of time browsing online, you have likely stumbled across one of those unfortunate websites that has managed to weather the transition from old to new school web design…sort of. If you navigate down past the landing page, the storefront, the newest blog posts, you will find another website hidden inside it. These pages look different, respond differently and are clearly relics from an earlier part of the website’s history.
This is not an enticing experience for visitors or customers, who want to see consistency as a sign that the site is secure and serious and legitimate.
What to do: Be ruthless. Eliminate or hide old pages you don’t have time to update. Use 404 to 301 redirects to ensure your site is free of broken links and redirects visits to an outdated page to a new page of your choice instead.
Tip 6: Make sure your new website loads FAST.
Google is very clear about this – sites with faster load times will get higher priority in browser results. Plus, visitors won’t tolerate a site that takes longer than a second or two to load (statistics show 25 percent of visitors will leave after just 4 seconds’ delay time).
What to do: Use Google’s free mobile website speed test tool to see how fast your site loads.
Tip 7: Be sure your menu buttons are easy to spot.
Website themes have gotten quite savvy in recent years – so much so that they can actually manage to hide navigation tools like menu buttons right out in plain site. This is not a good thing. Less web-savvy visitors may just assume your site is broken or malfunctioning and will navigate away.
What to do: Be sure your site makes it easy to find such conventional tools as menu bars and navigation buttons, especially when it comes to finding your online store and contacting you!
Tip 8: Make your site look secure and credible.
Finally, there is no substitute for taking a serious attitude towards web security in today’s identity theft-centric culture. Having a secure socket layer (SSL) encrypted store (“Https://”) with a lock icon is essential, as is having security badges on payment pages and a certificate that matches your domain.
What to do: If you had lots of options, would you shop on your website? What would make you feel safe to input your credit card information or sign up for reseller hosting from your website? Add these tools to your site before launching.
These eight tips represent some of the most important criteria for giving your new website a competitive edge in browser results and organic inbound traffic. Following each tip will also ensure your website is attractive, intuitive, relevant, secure and all the things your site visitors will desire and expect from a website.