When was the last time you checked out your website? Has it been 3 months, 3 years? If it’s been awhile, it is likely time to take a look around. Whether you offer products or services, when a potential client visits your website they are getting their first impression of you and your business. Keeping your website updated and working properly is an important task to complete regularly.
Listed below are 5 key areas to focus on when updating your site. If you are unsure of how to complete these steps, it may be best to have a professional take a look and help you with your website.
1) Brand ~ Does your website accurately reflect your brand? Make sure your colors and font types are the same as your other materials. Finding and using your hex codes (a specific code for each color shade) for colors will help ensure everything looks the same. It is important to have a cohesive brand look and feel across all digital and print forms you utilize, including your website.
2) Links ~ Click on all the links. Make sure nothing is broken, and the links are taking visitors where you want them to go. If you have links within your site to anything off your site make sure it is still a valid, valuable resource. Additionally, make sure it opens in a new tab as this allows someone to easily navigate back to your site.
3) Contact ~ Have your contact information such as your phone number and email address displayed on every page, not just a contact us page. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to click to get in contact with you. This information can be placed in your header or footer to easily display across your entire website.
Bonus Tip ~ Have links on your site to all your social media platforms. Make it simple and easy for people to find and follow you on social media. And of course be active on your social media platforms!
4) Devices ~ It is important to check how your website looks when viewed on any device. It may look fantastic on a desktop, but not so much on a phone. And these days most people view everything on their phones. Luckily there are ways to tweak how your site looks on a phone or tablet, while leaving it as is for desktop viewing.
5) Call To Action (CTA) ~ Ask yourself what you want someone who visits your site to do? Then create a call to action for your site visitors. This can be in many forms, including a button, pop up or even a slide in bar. You may also want to have a form embedded on your site for people to send inquiries about your services/products.
Bonus Tip ~ offer a lead magnet (“freebie” ), which is something of value that people will want to have such as an informational document highlighting your specific business expertise. It should be informative, helpful and of course free. You can utilize this document to gather email addresses to build your email marketing list.
Keeping your website fresh and up to date not only looks better to your site visitors, but it makes for a better user experience, can help target your market, increase traffic to your site and grow your business!
