Must-Have Ingredients For A Successful Website

A corporate or business website is one of the first points of contact that stakeholders and target audiences watch out for in terms of your brand’s presence. First impressions matter heavily in the over-crowded digital marketplace and your website is one of the primary ways to interest, impress and possibly convert your audience. But before you build, revamp or redesign your website, you need to have a clear aim of what the website is set to achieve and the essential features it needs to accomplish your intent. There are some universally acknowledged principles of website design and development and expert opinion on what makes a world-class website. Let’s take a look at some of these recommendations.

CMS:CMS is a non-negotiable factor for a successful website. The content management system or CMS allows you a greater control of your content. It enables frequent updates, changes, and deletion of any type of content – images, text, audio or video. Website governance is simplified with the help of CMS and you can keep your website organized, updated and fresh at all times. CMS can also enhance website performance, SEO and several areas of website administration.

Message:

1. Value proposition: Your website’s purpose and message to market should be clear enough to a first time visitor right from the home page. Provide visitors an understanding of what your business is about, who your customers are, and what sets you apart. Your brand’s value proposition explicitly states your unique significance and worth that compels customers to choose you over competition. 2) Storytelling: Corporate storytelling is a powerful technique in establishing an emotional connection between your brand and your audience. Everyone loves a good story and what this tool does is – it adds a relatable or educational dimension to your product or business. Your virtual identity becomes memorable, approachable and it create an overall engaging experience for the user.

Design:

1. Intuitive Navigation: It is quite simply the ease of use and ability to navigate to the information that the users desire, seamlessly. Intuitive website navigation allows users to travel from page to page consuming the information they want and bypassing what they don’t. It reduces the bounce rate and helps website traffic and subscribers. Once you have understood the tenets of user-friendly navigation, it is fairly easy to implement with a main navigation bar, call-to-action CTAs, sidebar, signposts, landing pages and internal linking.
2. Usability and Accessibility: While similar to intuitive navigation, usability covers a broad spectrum of web design and development that focus on the user. An accessible website is available at all times. To ensure this you need to monitor server uptime, broken links, and mobile responsiveness. The goal of usability is clarity and simplicity. A great website design reduces visitor or user effort, doesn’t distract or confuse its audience. It also means providing relevant content in the order that users expect to find it.
3. Visuals: A picture is worth more than a thousand words on the internet. It breaks the textual clutter, conveys much more than text can, and hooks the visitors to read more and peruse the website further. A great website design uses images, animation, infographics and several visual elements to its advantage – creating an engaging and informative user experience. 4) Responsive Web Design: It is no longer adequate to simply have a website. It should work for every type of user and his/her device. Responsive web design has been around for a while and it has changed the way people access websites now. Many companies create a mobile website that redirects the user from the company landing page or create a fully responsive solution that works for all devices.

Performance:

1. Page Load Speed: It is common knowledge that users abandon websites that take too long to load. Too long is anywhere between 3-10 seconds. The average user expects your home page or other links to open within 3 seconds. There are many ways to optimize page loading times – minimize HTTP requests, reducing server response time, enabling compression and browser caching etc.
2. Low Bounce Rate: When any user (customer, prospect, or stakeholder) visits your site on any page and leaves without visiting other pages on the same domain, it is called a bounce. The bounce rate is the percentage of all users who enter and exit on the same page, without clicks to other webpages on your site. High bounce rates indicate your site may not have enticing, well organized landing pages. To ensure low bounce rate, you have to create highly effective content, well organized information architecture, CTAs, using fresh content with targeted keywords etc.

Conclusion:There are many factors like strong website copy, good SEO practice, blogging, website promotion and social media that complete the picture. You need to establish clear goals and a timeline for implementing each of these features. You will also require expert web developers. ASP.NET programmers are available for hire on many job boards and recruitment forums. An experienced and certified programmer can realize your mission.

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