3 Essential Factors to Consider Before Building Your Website

Featured article by Emily Roberts, Independent Technology Author

Regardless of all the other digital marketing strategies that are essential for companies today, your website is undoubtedly the most essential. Whether or not you are selling products or services online, a website is essential for reaching out to your target audience and providing a central hub for your online presence.

Your website is the key place where potential customers will find out about your brand, products, services, and more. So, it’s important to keep these key factors in mind when it comes to designing a site that stands out from the crowd and appeals to your target audience.

#1. Consider Your Customers:

When it comes to putting together the perfect website for your business and brand, the first thing that you’ll need to consider is your customers. Although you may like design elements yourself, it’s important to firstly consider the customer journey before any ideas or preferences of your own. Creating customer profiles can be a good way to do this; conduct market research to find out more about your typical customers and put together an outline of what they would be looking for the most from a site.

In general, however, all customers tend to prefer a site that loads quickly, is free from clutter and unnecessary distractions, and has an easy-to-use navigation system which allows them to find what they are looking for easily. To achieve this, try this tool for building your own website, which allows you to create a website accessible on multiple devices. Your site should also be visually appealing to your customers; keep this in mind when coming up with colour schemes, deciding where to place your logo, and adding other design aspects, such as images and videos, to your site.

#2. Consider SEO:

When building your website, it’s not just your customers that you will need to think about, but also search engines. How SEO-friendly your website is will influence a number of factors, but most importantly, where your website appears in search engine rankings. Along with the content that your site publishes and the placement of relevant keywords, there are various design elements that will affect the ranking of your site.

For example, site loading speed is an important factor; visitors don’t like to be kept waiting for a site to load and Google will quickly pick up on this and penalise your site. In addition, how mobile-friendly your site is will also play a part, with more and more web users now browsing on smartphones, tablets and other smart devices. So, ensure that you choose a responsive design, or use a site building tool that provides you with a mobile-friendly result.

#3. Create Readable Content:

Once you have decided on a website design that appeals to your target audience and keeps search engines satisfied, it’s important to ensure that the content on your website keeps up. Bear in mind that your content is going to be the first thing that both search engines and web users see on your website.

Not only should your content be catchy enough to grab the attention of users searching for relevant keywords in Google and other search engines, it should also be interesting enough to keep them on your website and lead to conversions. Some tips for creating readable content include using a font size of 16pt or above to make it physically easier to read, along with dividing content into smaller portions rather than using one large block of text.

These are just some of the most important things to consider when putting together your website. If you found this information useful, then we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.