Creating a professional website is crucial for the success and the lifeblood of any business today — sadly, often today, it is a headache for entrepreneurs that they want to get over with rather than a vital opportunity they can exploit.
There are a few things that are undisputed: it takes time, energy and sometimes a lot of money to develop a functional website, pleasant to navigate with excellent SEO. Not to mention that, like any other technology, the Internet is constantly evolving: from Google’s algorithms to the evolution of designs, from application updates to the support of various mobile devices. Companies need to constantly adapt if they want to survive in the digital sphere.
- So how to create a professional website that holds up?
- Is it possible to create a free professional website?
- Who can you contact to help you design a professional website?
- If you already have a website, what steps can you take to optimize it?
In this article, we have tried to identify the most important elements you should pay particular attention to if you want to maximize the potentiality and professionalism of your website.
The Most Important Metric of Success: The Bounce Time
Your website statistics (available through tools like Google Analytics) are the best reflection of your website’s performance and efficiency — they show how your visitors interact with it, how many of them use your services/buy your products, and what pages are most attractive. This data allows you to pinpoint and analyze where the problem lies and you can explore ways to optimize it.
The most important data point you should pay attention to, however, is the bounce time, i.e. the amount of time a user spends on your website: if it is fast, it means that the user is not finding what they’re looking for. This means there is a problem and that you have to fix by making changes quickly. Otherwise, you will lose the interest of your visitors, and your revenues with it.
Fluid Navigations
The first aspect of your website you must focus on should be the fluidity of navigation and especially the loading time of the pages. A slow loading time will not only discourage visitors from exploring your website, but it will also result in penalties by Google, which would mean less organic traffic.
It is also possible that some of your pages have technical errors: your users will not see any content besides a “404 error” message. This could significantly
Finally, websites with a poor UX (user experience), i.e. an unappealing interface for the user (e.g. pop-ups that open all the time) will also result in a high bounce rate and a penalty from Google. These techniques worked ages ago, but nowadays, they look extremely unprofessional and do way more harm than good.
Responsive Design
Another point of attention is “responsive design”, i.e. adapting the navigation to any device. With nearly 60% of searches being done on mobile devices and online shopping via smartphone exploding, you need to make sure that the navigation and the buttons on your website are capable of serving users with devices of any screen size. Google has an excellent free tool called PageSpeed Insight that allows you to test the responsiveness of your website on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Enter your website’s URL and let the tool tell you how effective it is.
The Design
Your site may also disappoint visitors if you have an outdated design. Many companies do not improve upon and evolve the look of their website over time, and although this doesn’t influence its functionality in the strictest definition of the word, it does not make visitors want to continue browsing.
As with everything, it is the first impression that counts, and it is the image of your company that is at stake! A simple solution is to opt for an increasingly popular modular design. The basic principle is to use a single, flexible template that can be adapted to different types of content. If you can’t do it on your own, then we definitely recommend Acclaim Agency UK to help you with your projects. They’re reliable and trustworthy with years of experience working in the sector.
