7 Things to Include Before Building a New Website

If you’re sitting in front of your website and thinking that it’s probably about time to give your website a much needed redesign, then you’re not alone. There are plenty of businesses that designed their website initially without putting too much thought into the customer experience and the design. Just like updating your brand, you should also consider updating your online presence as it will benefit your business by providing trust, improving your credibility and strengthening your online brand awareness.

Here are our top tips to consider before building a New Website.

1. Newsletter Signup

Adding a sign-up form to your website is a great way to increase your customer database. Customers that love your brand and your products and services will want to be in the know for the special promotions, new releases and special events. Also developing your customer database, means that you have direct access to your target audience to advertise promotions to.

2. Clear & Beautiful Images

Always use high quality and professional images for your website to show off your products. It’s a fine line where you want make sure that your website images will download quickly and won’t impact your website speed, but you also don’t want images that are pixelated. Using photoshop, you can easily set the pixel size for your website and also amend the resolution of the image. Still not sure, then get in contact with a graphic designer to help you.

3. Testimonials

Get in contact with your customers to find out if they will provide a testimonial from you. The best time to grab their testimonial is straight after they have used your product or service. It doesn’t need to be long, but try to get them to mention the name of the product and service they purchased and their experience. You can also use testimonials from Facebook or from Google Reviews for your website. Testimonials are an extremely powerful way to add credibility and build trust for your brand, products and or services and will often be a driving force to converting customers when they’re sitting on the fence about a product or service.

4. Your business’s contact details

If you have business, that involves a fair amount of customer contact, for example a medical clinic, restaurant or hotel then it’s fairly important that your contact details particularly email and phone number are easy to find and clear to read. For example you may want to consider placing the contact number of your business in the navigation header design of your website. Adding a Google map plugin with a location marker on your contact us page, will help customers in finding your business. Along with this, if you’re business is located in a shopping centre, make sure that you give clear instructions on where they can find you. You can also upload images of your storefront to Google My Business, so they know what your business looks like from the outside.

5. Blogs and News to Improve Website SEO

Take your SEO up a notch by regularly writing a news article or blog about one of your products or services. Blogs are a form of inbound marketing, which means it’s content that draws people to your website. Writing more on products or services add credibility and trust to your brand and also positions your business or yourself as an authority on that topic which leads to more people trusting your products and more likely to purchase your products and or services. In terms of SEO, make sure that your articles are long form articles and also include keywords or terms that your customers would be searching for.

6. Check mobile friendliness on your website

Mobile optimisation is about ensuring that visitors that access your website have an optimised experience while using that device. Every year, an increasing amount of people are using their mobile devices more often to access information. So it’s no surprise here that mobile optimisation is a the top of the list when it comes to designing and building a new website.

Site design for a mobile is important, particularly for websites that have page banners, customers need to be able to clearly read the information no matter what device they are using. Our top tips for mobile site design, include not using flash, no pop ups and design for a fat finger for a better touch screen experience.

7. Use Colour Psychology

Using the colour red on your website is a powerful way to draw the eyes attention to a price or a sale. Red is synonymous for being associated with a sale, which in turn to most consumers means value. So why not create attention to products by changing the price to red or increasing the font size so that its clear to the site visitor. Some websites use green for their add to cart buttons, as green is associated as being safe and ready to go. Depending on your site design, colour can play a special part in the customer experience.

7 Things to Include Before Building a New Website