A business’ website is crucial to providing potential customers with information regarding their business. For ecommerce sites, it is essential that traffic is brought into their website in order to make sales. Here are 8 elements that you can include in your website:
Write quality content
The best websites out there consistently write great content. If you produce content that people will want to read they are likely to return to your website to read more. Google’s algorithm for ranking search results recognises content that is of high quality and rewards them with a higher ranking. This will help bring users to the website and it is up to the content itself and the accessibility of the website to keep them there.
Social Links
It is important to make sure you link your social media channels on your website. If you are going to post regular content, social media is a great way of announcing it to those who have an interest in your business. A successful integration with social media should help increase traffic to your website and it is up to the design and precedence of the website to keep them there before they bounce.
Precedence
A well thought out website design will naturally guide the user towards important information through various design choices. An example of how precedence is used effectively on websites is the logo. It is usually large at the top left of top middle. This is because the user’s eye will naturally read from here as they would read a book or a newspaper.
Call-To-Action
A call to action is when certain techniques are used to gain an immediate response from the user. A good example of a call to action is a ‘Call Now’ button. A successful call to action must stand out from the page and persuade the user to click on it. This can be done by increasing its size or changing its colour.
Flat Design
After Apple and Windows’ transition to flat design for their operating systems, it has impacted design heavily, with plenty of websites transitioning to simpler, flat webpages. This replaced the widely used skeuomorphic designs previously. The benefits of flat design is it is more minimal than skeuomorphic, and is therefore more adaptable and cleaner.
Hamburger Menu’s
Using a hamburger menu is a great way of minimising the user interface, particularly if you have a lot of sub links that take you to different pages. The hamburger is a graphical interface tool used commonly to compress the menu so that it is visible when the icon is clicked. This has become popular for websites on mobile devices as it allows them to retain some of the space that would be lost if they had to stack the menu. This space can be used to display the homepage.
‘About Us’ Page
Having an about us page is essential to a business website because it is your chance to really sell the business to the potential customers and persuade them to choose your service. It is important to add contact details and the location of your business so the user knows where to reach you. You can integrate your location with Google maps to provide a recognisable and visual experience for the user. The benefit of this on mobile is that you can use GPS to get directions to the business.
Consistent
Keeping a website consistent is essential to keeping the attention of the user. If your website features too much variety in design, it may become confusing to navigate. A chosen colour scheme can also help brand your business.
