You've reached the stage of increasing your digital presence, but is building your own website the best approach?
Your website is essentially your digital shop window. Your current and potential customers will gauge everything from business authenticity to ability based on how your site looks and feels. From the navigation to the images you use, there's a huge remit of things to factor in when building your cyber shop window.
The first step when deciding to host a website is choosing which platform you're going to use to build your website. For many business owners, the thought of spending hours of your day coding and debugging HTML, CSS and JavaScript just isn't feasible. That's where web builders come in. You could use a platform such as Wix.com to build a website using their drag and drop approach. However, it is important to remember that your website design is just as important as the coding that lives beneath it. Just because it's more user friendly to use one of these visual based editors, it doesn't make building a website a walk in the park. Why? Because there are elements of web building that require some knowledge of user experience and consumer psychology. What this means is that in essence, you need to be able to create a site that users are drawn into through the use of visuals and copy but also the placement of everything from buttons to data entry forms. When you're designing your site, it's important to always look at the customer journey - what they see, what they feel and one of the best questions to ask yourself - so what?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation also plays an integral role in the success of your website. Think about when you have been looking for a product or service using a search engine such as Google. Whilst the platforms themselves are relatively simple, text based results pages, what you are being shown is actually a result of many complex algorithms and Google's 'crawling' of websites. What this means is that you need to take some time to learn the basics of SEO. Whilst much of SEO discoverability is based around keywords, engines such as Google have now become much more in-depth in their approach to indexing. This means that they will actually 'crawl' your website, taking into account things such as accessibility, whether your website is responsive to different devices and other areas like whether your business has a social media presence and if your website URL has been mentioned on other credible websites.
Customer perception of your business can be based whole-heartedly on your website. If it's the first time someone has come across your brand it is argued that you will only have 50 milliseconds to make the right impression. Remember, that as we become more engrossed in digital media, our attention spans decrease. So how do you create a lasting impression within this minuscule window of opportunity? It's all about showing your business in all of it's glory. Imagine that you're a florist - it could be beneficial to have a professional videographer capture the final touches on one of your masterpieces. You can then use this as a full screen, high definition welcome screen. Of course, it's not a 100% success rate as with any digital content, however it makes the web experience immersive and intriguing and in many cases will help to increase your conversion rate.
Building a website is a process, it's something that you need to carefully consider as it could end up becoming a sticking point rather than a passion project. If you're looking for a slick, responsive website without spending precious business hours on it's development, why not get in touch with us at Dimension today.
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