When it comes to your company’s website, what really matters these days? There are many elements to a website that companies have to consider. Depending on your business, product, or service, the website that represents your company should be unique enough to represent your brand while maintaining a certain level of standardization that matches your customers’ wants and needs, which is a fancy way of saying… your site needs to look cool, be on brand, and give the appropriate information in the right places.
Here are a few tips to consider when building your company website:
1. Mobile. Mobile. Mobile. Build your site with priority functionality geared towards mobile users.
More users are accessing content via their smartphones than ever before. According to one study, approximately 83% of the U.S. population are mobile internet users. That is about 274 million people who are accessing the internet via mobile devices.
2. Great user experience always WINS. Content editing, navigation usability, internal/external links testing, HTML & CSS validation, and styling/scripting minification are all parts of the user experience that play a part in your search engine optimization (SEO)
User experience is the new search engine optimization. Tricks like keyword density and backlinking (while still important) have been mostly replaced with content relevancy, sitewide performance, and user experience. Search engines are getting to the place where keywords aren’t needed to determine the subject matter.
3. Your site can’t just look good… it actually has to work, too. Use BEST back-end practices.
Along with building what users see (the front-end of your website), it is important to use best practices when building your back-end. This includes data storage, security, server environments, and application monitoring.
There are a lot more nitty-gritty subjects like content accessibility, cross-browser functionality, markup validation, JavaScript error management, site migration, digital marketing, GDPR compliance, and goal setting that all play a part in building and maintaining your company website, but we’ll stop there as our goal is to be helpful and not overwhelm.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be complicated nor does it have to consume your time as a business owner/manager. If you so choose, you can move all this stuff from YOUR plate to OURS. The BARK Firm has been building custom-tailored websites for our clients for over a decade! Along with front-end development, we build out a secure back-end that will keep your site performing for both users and bots alike. Keep it simple. Give us a call. We’re happy to help.