Making your website better

If you’ve had a website for a while and think it could be working better for your business, you’ve come to the right place.

We know you don’t have time to learn new skills and and a new language. We are here to help you.

Most websites can be improved to make your business more efficient, more profitable or better placed in the marketplace. Web trends move very quickly and you can soon get left behind when your website fails to meet modern criteria.

So how can you improve your website?

That’s like asking us how long is a piece of string, but we’ll give you some ideas. Our first task would be to check your statistics because, without a measure, you won’t be able to to see the effect our improvements have made.

Then there are many ways you could improve your website.

Attracting more visitors

Attracting more visitors is probably the most popular website ‘improvement’ asked for, but it is also a dangerously shallow one and there should be many other improvements placed before it. Attracting more visitors doesn’t automatically mean more sales and care should be taken to ensure that higher pageviews are matched with higher ‘conversions’.

Conversions are the visitors which complete a goal, usually a sale, but sometimes an enquiry, a download or a newsletter subscription, or even a phone call.

This is the statistic to improve on if you are going by numbers.

But before you work on numbers, there are a few other areas to look at.

Usability

This is probably the most important area to focus on. Usability is the concept of helping your users do things on your website. Guiding them through paths you have designed for them, so they complete goals with little effort.

There is a very good book on website usability by Steve Krug. It’s called ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ and it cleverly examines how websites can be made intuitive. The principle is that the less your users have to think, the more easily they will do what you want them to.

Every website is different and small changes can have a major effect. Sometimes changing single words, perhaps in a menu, can have dramatic results

You can read more about our usability services here.

Marketing

We are puzzled by the number of customers who genuinely believe that websites are machines that require no maintenance or marketing. They are not, they are tools. Websites need selling and we are very fortunate to have some incredibly good marketing tools on the web. They’re good because they can be measured. You may have heard the old adage ‘Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just wish I knew which half’. That rarely applies to web marketing because it is far easier to measure the effect of your spend.

Marketing can be done through traditional channels such as press and direct mail, or it can be given the modern touch with social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Design

Visual design is crucial to your website, and we always look at how design can complement an improvement strategy. A redesign alone is not enough to improve the numbers, so we find ways of adding value to your design.

Got questions? justask@canarydwarf.co.uk