Before Facebook likes, Twitter follows, Instagram hearts, and the divvying up of life’s minutiae into updates, tweets, and hashtags, a website was how a savvy business made its digital presence known. Of course, with the increasing popularity of social media, many companies turned their focus to beefing up their social media presence, leaving their websites with outdated design, outdated information, and outdated usefulness.
If your company’s website could use a little spiffing up, here are six ideas to update what should be the strongest digital marketing tool you have.
- First and foremost, make it visually appealing. This means crisp layouts, clean designs, well placed headlines, and images that don’t look like they were downloaded off a stock photo website. Your website should be easy on the eyes, with prominently featured, well-composed photos of what you’re selling. Remember, the web is a highly visual medium! Your site should draw people in initially because it’s lovely to look at.
- Make the text easy to read. Long paragraphs work well in print media, but they’re hard to read on a screen. Web-friendly text typically means scannable text: short paragraphs and lots of bulleted or numbered lists. This helps people find the information they’re after quickly and easily. A distinct call to action, as a button or standalone link, may help you get the sales results you’re after.
- Make your design consistent. Everything on your website should look like it belongs on your website. This includes colors, fonts, layouts, image styles, buttons, and more.
- Make your site uncluttered. This means keeping visual noise down by using white space freely and keeping important headlines and images prominent. When you’re able to eliminate visual competition, the key stuff grabs your visitors’ attention much more effectively.
- Make it mobile friendly. According to the latest statistics from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, more than half of our digital media time is now spent on a mobile device. Plus, in May, Google confirmed that more searches take place on mobile devices than on PCs. If your site design isn’t responsive and mobile friendly, you risk losing the attention of millions of users.
- Make it fast. There are lots of websites out there, and no one has any patience for the ones that load slowly. If your website won’t load quickly, users will click away. If your site is lagging to show up, take advantage of free tools like Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Tools to measure your website’s speed and find tips for making it faster.
The best part about these six things is that you probably don’t need to invest the time and cost in a complete website redesign. Just a few layout changes, text improvements, and visual tweaks can take your company’s website from outdated to updated. Boost its load speed and compatibility with smartphones, and you’ll have a completely contemporary site that serves as an ideal complement to your social media presence and a standalone source of information for current and potential customers.