To get the most out of your website, make sure to complete our basics, intermediate, and advanced guides that dissect the different stages of good web design. If you’ve completed all three guides (congratulations!), then your website is ready to take on decent web traffic! So, what’s next?
The simple answer is maintenance. Your customer base and technology are constantly changing year over year. If you treat your website as a one-time investment, you’ll eventually grow out of touch and outdated with customers. At Uplancer, we truly believe that to maintain a great site, you’ll need to constantly tweak your web design to meet your customer’s digital expectations. Take a closer look into what that truly means below.
Continuous Improvement in Your Web Design
The hallmark of a great web design is that it provides the best customer experience. The tried and true way is to base all decisions for your website on qualitative and quantitative data. That means leveraging as much of your website analytics as possible to understand what your customers are doing on your site. That also means you’ll need to understand what’s resonating with them.
You’ll provide the best customer experience when you implement continuous improvements. This requires a standardized improvement process. Typically, you’ll need a way to collect feedback from your customers (quantitative and/or qualitative), benchmark that feedback against key performance indicators, assign and execute action items, and monitor the results to see whether your changes improved your site. By reviewing your data and making web design adjustments periodically, you’ll keep pace with your customers.
Organic Website Content
Organic content refers to building articles around your key service offerings or around your organizational needs. Your goal is to capture visitors who stumble upon your site while searching keywords. This is something an SEO expert can help craft a strategy around. This approach is an ongoing process that requires several months to see significant results in sales.
With organic content, planning and strategy are required, so don’t write just to write. From a website perspective, you’ll need to understand the layout and how it comes into play in the overall site architecture. At times, you may even realize keywords where you can compete.
Building content is a never-ending process. Like continuous improvement, your customers and their preferences are changing, so maintain your content to keep up with their content expectations.
Incorporate Paid Media
You’ve gotta spend money to make money – treat paid media as your best friend. It’s a tool that accomplishes two things: 1) bridges the stopgap between the launch of your site and when your organic content starts to work, which may take more than six months and 2) keeps your sales funnel full for future business. The question is, how much budget should you set aside?
Connect with an SEO expert to confirm that you’ve got a way to track users across your webpage if they are accessing your ads from a search engine. Otherwise, you’ll report incorrect data which can alter website management.
Deeper Web Design Customization
One major limitation of using a CMS is its effect on your website performance. Perhaps you’ve optimized everything, including using the bare minimum plugins, custom code, and third-party services, and yet, your website is clunky. According to Google, a site that takes more than a second and a half to load faces a 32% increase in bounce rate (the rate at which someone leaves your site without doing anything). That’s some serious loss of traffic given all the hard work that you’ve done.
If you’re facing slow page loads without any resolution in sight, then it’s probably time to consider rebuilding your site. Moving away from a traditional CMS site and into a custom-coded site might be the most cost-effective solution. Get a free consultation and connect with us today.
The Bottom Line
Building a website isn’t a one-time thing. Make sure that you’ve got data collection and are making decisions based on concrete facts and data. Connect with our team today to get you the ultimate experience for your website!
