Going onto a website is like knocking at someone’s front door, except without the real-life curb appeal – it’s just digital instead. When you arrive at someone’s house, you take in the surroundings, think about how you got there and generally expect it to be something pleasing to the eye. If not, you’re out of there or making excuses to leave as soon as you can. This is just the way that potential customers or viewers to your blog or website can see it, except they don’t need to make pleasantries … they’ll just click off and won’t return.
Accessible
People want a clean, clear and accessible website. The average time for somebody to be landed on your page and make a decision about whether they want to stay on it or not is just 15 seconds – and it’s that quarter of a minute that you need to utilise to your advantage. If you haven’t got anything instantly appealing, engaging or informative on there, your customers will be off quicker than you can say “double-click”.
Design
How your website looks makes a massive difference to whether people want to stay for a while or click off. You need to be hitting your target demographic when you’re thinking about website design, so for example if it’s for children then bright colours will need to be used and you won’t go wrong to throw in some games on the site too. A good website design agency will be able to steer you towards what you want and will most likely be able to expand the ideas that you are able to give them for the creation of your website and add to it to generate something that will return the most traffic. Designers aren’t mind-readers; give them a concise overview of what you want and remember to include important things like colour palette, fonts, pictures and anything else that you definitely want included. An informative brief leads to an excellent website, and it shows when people have put a lot of thought into their online presence.
Relevant
Keep everything on your website relevant to what it’s actually about. This includes the tab header, the content and even the links that you’ve got to other pages. If, for example, you’re on a page about televisions, you don’t want a to see something that will link you to a gardening page. Unless it’s related to what you are advertising or writing about, keep it away. Those who are visiting your website are doing it in good faith; they expect to land on a page that will give them exactly what they want, if not a little bit more. There is an element of surprise that people are looking for, but it’s one that lies in deals, promotions and offers for them – not spammy links to affiliated companies for your own personal profit. The more that your visitors realise that you are making money from them visiting, the less likely they are to return to you.
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