Launching a new website? How exciting! It’s your chance to showcase your brand online and get found on the internet. While you’re adding pages and editing navigation menus, here are a few tips to keep in mind along the way:
1. Keep it clean and easy to read: Don’t get carried away with lots of animation, fancy fonts that are difficult to read, or too much information crammed into one space. Visual distractions or hard to find information can be a quick exit point for your consumer. A clean, easy to navigate website is the way to go.
2. Consistency: Use the colors of your logo, the fonts in your logo, and utilize them throughout your website. Does all the text on your site use the same voice, the voice of your brand? Every page, every graphic, every sentence is a reflection of your company, who you are, and what you’re selling. If you’re on your homepage and deleted your logo, would you still know whose website you’re on? If the answer is yes, you’ve done your job.
3. Invest in a professional photo shoot: We cannot stress this enough. We’ve already written an entire blog about this (you can find it here), but take the time, spend the money (it’s not that much) and have a professional photo shoot done before you launch your website. You are going to be so much happier with how you and/or your products, and the website as a whole look with professional photos.
4. Make it easy to get in touch with you: One of our biggest pet peeves is when you have to click through 12 different links and finally find the teeny-tiny link that says “contact us”. If someone is on your site and looking to get in touch with you, they’re interested in who you are and what you offer. Don’t make it hard to reach you. Provide multiple channels for consumers to get in touch with you: Submit a contact form online; provide an e-mail address; a phone number; social media accounts where they can message you. There’s one catch, any contact method you add to your website, make sure you actually check it. Did you put a LinkedIn account on there, but haven’t checked LinkedIn in 3 months? That’s probably going to be an issue.
5. SEO Compatibility: Typically, the final step in website design is making sure your site is Search Engine Optimized, meaning will “the internet” be able to find you? You do this using the name of your company, the type of organization, location, the services you offer, and targeted keywords on the back end of your site. Each page should have a title and brief description. These help your site to become more likely to show up in search engine results if someone types in those keywords, or is searching for someone who provides the same services you do.
Check out some of the websites we’ve designed here at k+a