Website development uses a generic solution
As a web design and development agency in Reading, Berkshire, we know that there are a number of ways to improve your website that can be done quickly and easily.
Our most successful clients do all of these or we do them on their behalf, and you can too in order to bring more customers to your website.
We’ve split these into things you ‘should’ be able to do and things you may need your developer to do.
We say ‘should’ because we have no idea how your website is built, but in general all of these things ‘could’ be under your control.
Changes under your control
1. Add fresh content to your website
If you could only do one thing, this would be it.
Add high quality, SEO focused content to your website as often as possible.
This could be a:
- New page.
- Blog post.
- Case study.
- Portfolio post.
Get into the habit of making it high quality.
Make sure you understand what content you need to create.
This isn’t something that should be done via guesswork, there are free tools such as Google Search Console that will give you laser focus for content creation, showing you exactly how your potential customers are trying to find you.
2. Get your SEO basics in place
- Optimise title tags and meta descriptions.
- Use alt text for images.
- Make sure your urls are clean and descriptive.
3. Improve your CTAs (Calls To Action)
You know what action you want a potential customer to take on your website.
It could be to call you, email you or fill in a form.
Ensure that you have your primary CTA above the fold.
This is the area of your website that is visible without scrolling with your mouse or swiping on a mobile device.
Visually it should stand out so that the visitors eye is drawn to it.
4. Simplify navigation
You’ve worked hard to get someone to your website.
Don’t lose them by overcomplicating your navigation.
Less is definitely better and you know what action you really want your potential customer to take.
You can move less important items into your footer and you can add a search facility so that people can quickly find more ‘niche’ content that is important to them.
Changes that may be outside of your control but your web developer can action quickly
5. Speed up your website
Google loves a speedy website, your potential customers love a speedy website.
- Images are generally the culprit of a slow website. Ensure you use modern image formats like WebP and AVIF.
- Your website should serve up optimised images for the device being used so that for instance on a mobile, you’re not loading a large image needed on a laptop.
- Check that you have some caching. This serves up pages much quicker.This could be done via your host or your developer may add it to your wesbite.
6. Improve mobile experience
Most of your traffic ‘should’ be coming from mobile devices.
There are free tools that will tell you the exact percentage, such as Google Analytics.
Therefore you want to ensure that your website is responsive / mobile friendly.
Just check on your phone, ask your friends and family who will have different phones how it looks for them.
If it is a problem then this will require some developer time.
7. Keep your site secure
- Ensure that your site uses https.
- Keep your website up to date.
My CMS (Content Management System) doesn’t allow me to do these things
If you have a CMS that makes it difficult or impossible to do any of these things then that is a big problem.
In our experience a CMS is complicated to use when:
- It has been built using a generic solution that the agency understands but you don’t.
- It has been custom developed with not enough options
Let’s have a quick look at these 2 separate issues.
There are tools out there, fantastic tools, that aid in building websites.
A lot of agencies use these and are experts in bending them to their will.
If after launching your website, they continue to look after your website, then you’ll be good.
The problem comes when you want to manage it.
Suddenly you’re expected to become an expert in a tool that you don’t really have any interest in learning and although that tool is very powerful, it is complicated to learn.
By their very nature, generic solutions have to come with a wealth of choice and this contributes to the editing experience being overwhelming.
A good agency will provide some training, but please make sure you know up front, ideally by way of a demo, how you will be maintaining your site once it has been launched.
If no demo is offered or it feels complicated, alarm bells should be ringing.
Custom development with not enough options
If agencies go down the custom development route, then theoretically you can have whatever you like.
However, now you need to keep your agency honest.
Lots of our clients have previously gone down this route but quickly find they do not have enough control over their website.
Worst case scenario it is also too complicated to even do the simple things.
In our professional opinion this is a lack of requirements gathering early in the process.
How do we approach this?
In our opinion, custom development is the best path for ALL businesses, large and small.
We put a lot of work up front into gathering requirements and understanding exactly what your website needs to do for you.
We then reduce complexity in the editing experience whilst maintaining the power.
This is done via a number of simple to use content blocks that allow you to build whatever you like.
Simple configuration options are inclucde and we give you a simple way to manage your SEO strategy should you want to.