Member Article

10 Things Every Website Needs

Responsive

65% of UK web traffic is now on mobile. With Google giving preference to mobile friendly websites it is important to know if your website is responsive or not.

You can check if your website is mobile friendly simply by entering you web address into Google’s official tool below.

Google Mobile Speed Test Tool

The benefits of responsive design are more than just a boost from Google. Responsive websites load faster and are more user friendly. Below is a recommended article to read on the benefits of responsive web design.

12 Benefits of Responsive Web Design

Clear calls to action

Having a clear call to action is the most important message on your website. What do you want your customers to do? Be it to get in contact, fill out a form, to sign up for a seminar, or simply to buy your product. If the customer has taken the time to visit your website, you want them to take the desired action.

Fantastic call to action examples

Contact details/form/data collection

44% of website visitors will leave a company website if there is no contact info or phone number. Having a short and concise contact form can be key to making it as easy as possible for your customers to contact you and collect valuable data. Here’s a great article on great contact forms.

25 amazing contact us pages

Up To Date Content – News/Blog/Case studies

Companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t. Google also loves new website content and will visit your website more often. You don’t have to create content like crazy! A well thought out, researched article or piece of commentary will always be more successful. Rich and valuable content will always be king.

User journey

Are you taking your customer’s down the path of conversion? Are you putting too many obstacles in the way to distract and obstruct your customer from undertaking the action you want them to. Here’s a great post from the fantastic Econsultancy blog on excellent ecommerce examples.

25 Excellent Examples User Journey Examples

Analytics

Google Analytics provides free insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back. Any decision to redesign or change any aspect of your website is always better made with actionable data. If you don’t have access to Google Analytics, here is a link to the ‘Absolute Beginners Guide to Google Analytics’ from MOZ.com

Absolute Beginners Guide to Google Analytics

SEO

Position 1 and 2 account for 47% of all clicks on Google. SEO gets a bad name for unscrupulous selling and bad practice, but there are a lot of things you can do yourself to help Google and users find you website for the keywords you want to target. Here is a fantastic guide for beginners for the people at Kissmetrics.

SEO: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

Social media

Social media adds multiple touch points for your customers and is good for SEO. It also is a great way to make it as easy as possible for your customers to contact you and for them to see so easy to produce and up to date content. Here’s an easy to follow article on how to add a simple Twitter widget to your website.

How add a twitter widget to your website

Load speed

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow website load speed will not only make customers abandon your website, but Google also penalises slow loading websites.

You can check your website load speed using Google official tool blow.

Google Website Load Speed Tool

There are some simple steps you can take to reduce your website load time. Here are five easy ways you can optimise the speed of your website.

5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Website Load Speed

User experience

Once on a company’s homepage 52% of visitors expect to see about us information.

How do you want user to interact with your website? User experience is the final point that encompasses all of the above. Consider it from the outset, not as an afterthought. If you’ve taken the time to get traffic flowing to your website you want them to stay and become customers, not leave because of a poor experience.

As every website is unique, here is a great beginner’s cheat sheet on what you need to consider.

User Experience for Dummies Cheat Sheet

We have also provided a link to a slideshare presentation

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Carl Buckley .