6 Tips for Creating a Winning Website (and Mistakes To Avoid!)

Creating a functional, visually pleasing website is one of the most important steps small businesses can take for marketing. It is the number one platform to engage with potential customers and promote your product or service. Your website should include all of the basic pages (home, product/service, contact), but what takes it from a functional to a winning website are all the extra components that take it above and beyond.

6 Tips to Enhance Your Business Website

Add an Analytics Tool

Adding an analytics tool to your website, like Google Analytics, is an easy way to track what is happening across the site. You can’t expect to put up your website and your phone to automatically start ringing. It takes time to study how people interact with different pages, how long they stay on the site, and where they click. An analytics tool can help you learn these customer patterns and inform the next version of the website.

Don’t Treat Your Website Like It Is Written in Stone

Your website is a living, breathing document, and it should be treated as such. Constantly updating the copy, imagery, and services, based on analytics, allows you to effectively reach customers. Keep track of the different versions, or A/B test with a tool like Google Optimize, so that you don’t lose any of your work, but don’t be afraid to make changes!

Use Imagery To Tell Your Story

Adding high-quality imagery on your website is just as important as the copy. As humans, we tend to scan websites instead of reading them completely. If you can use an image that speaks to your message and is inclusive of age, gender, and race you can connect with your target audience and increase sales.

Communicate Through Style

The fonts, colors, copy, and imagery all communicate a message. What you choose to put on your website should all communicate who you are as a brand. For a brand that is trying to communicate confidence, you might choose darker colors and bold font, while a brand trying to communicate softness would choose curvy fonts and lighter colors.

Provide a Clear Call To Action

Every page on your website needs to have a clear call to action. One of the biggest things that will make a potential customer leave your website is nothing to engage with or a dead end. Make sure that every phone number, email address, and physical address links appropriately. Add a contact/shop now button or a form to every page to increase interactions and keep customers on your site.

Work With a Professional Copywriter

Your brand identity, who you are as a company, is mostly communicated through the copy on your website. It should be a balance of technical and non-technical copy that everyone can understand. Use humor and statistics when appropriate and take out as many filler words as possible. Professional copywriters know how to effectively convey strong messaging that is clear and concise. It can be helpful to work with one as you build out version one of your website.

5 Common Website Mistakes

Focusing Only on What You Are Selling

One of the biggest mistakes we see is when a business’s product or service page has all the facts (price, weight, measurements, details), but doesn’t have any language that entices a customer to make a purchase. Who does your customer become with your product or service? What problem does it solve in their life? Answers to questions like these begin to reveal a deeper layer of value that your product or service can offer.

People visit a website for their own reasons and to complete their sale they need to see something that speaks to them emotionally, adds value to their life, or makes them laugh. Don’t forget to add the same quality of messaging you have on the rest of your website to your product or service page.

Relying Completely on The Website

What is the point of having a winning website if no one visits it? You must put equal, if not more, effort into directing potential customers to your website through social media, SEO, ads, and email marketing. As you learn more about your customers and track website visitors, you will see how people are getting to the website and can then focus on effective marketing efforts even more.

Losing Customers to Confusion

Did you know that brand messaging can actually cause a customer to leave your site without making a purchase? Let’s take buttons, for example. If you have multiple buttons on a home page that all say something different, the customer will get confused. And a confused mind always says no. Staying consistent and clear with your brand messaging can only help engage customers and increase profits.

Putting Design over Clarity

We all know of a website that looks amazing, but the functionality side doesn’t work. A great design will take you far, but if a customer doesn’t know how to interact on the site, you will lose sales. It can be beneficial to work with both a design and engineering team to make sure the functionality is on par with the aesthetic.

Start Creating Your Winning Website Today!

Now that you know tips to make your website even better and mistakes to avoid, it’s time to create your own! You can use templates from sites like WordPress or Squarespace if you want to do it on your own, or you can work with a marketing agency for even better results. With an agency, you can rest assured that every aspect from design to development to functionality will be covered. Interested in learning about the Clear Function website approach? Contact us today!

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