Do I Really Have a Good Website?

As a business, there are numerous opportunities for reflection, change and growth. However, what happens when you don’t know what questions to ask? How do you recognize a problem you never know you had? Well, all we can say is that you keep reading and find out!

While there are numerous questions that you could ask yourself, there is only ONE that we want you to focus on today:

Don’t worry though, we aren’t just going to leave you with the question. We want you to be able to answer this confidently and recognize any issues with your current website. When it comes to a good website, there are several key areas that you should focus on:

Without these six areas of focus, a website can go from great to mediocre (or even poor) very quickly. Our goal at Stimulus is to create a site that capitalizes on all six components of an effective website, making your job easier and appealing to your current and potential clientele.

An effective website begins with a strong strategy. This strategy should evaluate and solve the needs of your customers while also analyzing the most popular content being accessed. Before any “coding” begins, a conversation needs to happen to determine what strategy you will take with the site. Do you want the site to be plain and direct? Is there key information users go to your site for that should be more easily accessible? These are just a few of the questions you can ask yourself when looking at your strategy.

The strategy should also give people the experience they desire. Whether it’s making it easier to find information or just adjusting the menu structure, these user experience modifications will help set your website up for success. It is important to remember that although it is your company, you aren’t designing the website for yourself. You need to determine who the site is for and what types of people will need to have access to your website. Have you made a plan for those who are disabled? One of the biggest mistakes we see is people designing a website to be what they like, versus what their customers NEED. Even if you are building an intranet website for your employees, you must make user experience stem from your stakeholders’ and customers’ perspectives.

After you have created your strategy and thought through the experience you want for your visitors, it will be key for you to establish points for conversion. Meaning, you will want to get people to perform an action once landing on your site Just take a few moments (a “few” could be a bit of an understatement), to evaluate what actions you would like people to take on your website. Would you like them to contact you directly to learn more about your products, or would you rather they get all of the information they need from the website and make their purchase? Once you have established those answers, it’s time to start creating/revising the content!

Your content is one of the most important things when it comes to search engine optimization and user traffic. You want to make sure that your site is saying something! Don’t allow fluff to keep you from getting the proper information to visitors. This content should lead to action and set you up as the thought leader. Pair this with some strong imagery and video and you’ve got a site! Read our blog on website photography to get more insight.

Now that your site has been thought out and planned, the design process begins. The design should take everything mentioned above and put it into practice. Remind yourself of your strategy, user experience goals, content and photography to build a truly effective site. Lastly, your site must be found, so make sure you define your meta descriptions and keywords for each page. This will help you stand out against the competition and push you towards the first page (if you aren’t already there).

So, let’s revisit that question:

Follow the steps above and you will be able to answer YES every time. If you don’t feel as confident in your “yes,” then why not give us a call and let us take you through the steps to an awesome website? Stimulus has been delivering strong web design solutions to customers for over 18 years. We love getting a chance to help each of our clients strategize and think through the web process, delivering strong websites each time. You can take a look at some of our proudest work below.