3 Things Every Website Needs
One of the most competitive domains of business ever is online websites. You have probably spent many hours perfecting your website launch, and it’s likely a significant facet of your business – be it via communication of your brand to customers or even as the whole business platform in the case of e-commerce. You’ve spent weeks carefully tweaking your site design, logo, and branding, but it can be easy to get caught up in what you think makes your site stand out. This can blind you to the simpler, but exponentially more important question: what does your site need? Here are some components of a great website that should be widespread.
A sense of clarity
Your site visitor is being marketed to at almost every stage of their online journey. All these messages can get a little confusing and can cause behavior like scanning through paragraphs to extract the key messages. As a result you should make it incredibly clear what your website is for, why your visitor should continue browsing it and how they can use and interact with your website’s features. Let them know every reason they have for staying on your website, and keep it visitor-focused: revolving around how you solve their problems.
A navigation system
It has been known for many years that the easier it is to buy a product or service on a website, the less time the visitor has to think about it and the higher sales conversion rate you obtain. A key way to improve on this is by making your website easy to navigate. The user should intuitively be guided through your offerings and they should be able to find whatever they might look for in a single moment with ease (think about search options and a useful index).
An awareness of the Lean
You can spend years perfecting your website before you think it’s ready for launch, but Lean philosophers like Eric Ries would tell you you’re making a mistake. There is a lot you can think about when starting a business, but what you will not be able to accurately predict is how many different types of people will respond to it, and which type of site interaction translates to higher revenue. This is why you need to test, test and test again! You should be able to test usability to boost conversion rates, accessibility to penetrate the 20% of adults that require additional accessibility, payment testing to reduce the 66% of mobile purchasers abandoning payment due to difficulties making the payment, and many more. If you’re not an expert techie you can easily get external help in each area, and many online experts such as digivante.com who can give you a complete testing package.
Having an awareness of these three elements is essential for managing a good site just as much as having a contact page and an about page is. All of this combined is what will increase visitor trust. Make sure you haven’t overlooked these 3 things and you will be well on your way to enjoying a successful and profitable site.
