Tips to Have an Awesome and Future-Proof Website

One of the most common questions we’re asked by our clients is usually something along the lines of “How do I build and maintain a great website?”. In this article, we list out a few of the most important things you need to do to achieve this.

Carefully planned journeys to educate, build credibility and sell to your customers

Make each and every interaction count. A touchpoint is any interaction a potential customer has with a brand on their journey to a purchase decision. An online touchpoint action could be anything from viewing a social post to reading a customer review.

A customer’s decision to purchase stems from a relationship that is created through a series of positive, consistent and authentic touchpoints. It’s your role to ensure that your website is up to scratch and each touchpoint is an accurate reflection of your brand. A single touchpoint that doesn’t positively interact with your customer could damage your relationship.

Turn it down a notch and make things simple again

According to an article by Forbes, the average person judges another person’s trustworthiness within 7 seconds. With a website that time drops down to 1/50th of a second.

That doesn’t give you much time to make an impact, does it? Taking a strategy out of Apple and Google’s book, their websites are monuments to the simple design. In an age where anyone can load up a website with full-blown videos, consider being the provider with a minimalist website that doesn’t need gimmicks but still manages to tick all the right boxes.

Cross platform compatibility

So, you’ve knuckled down and got yourself an engrossing and straightforward website, and you launch with immediate effect. Then, that night, while you’re encouraging everyone to check out your site, your web analytics show you have hits from mobile and tablet devices. You’ve checked it works across all devices, right?

There are numerous ways to access the web. Keep a close eye on Google Analytics to check the browsers and devices your viewers are using. Is most of it coming from mobile? Perhaps it’s time to build for mobile-first. Learn about your audience and make sure your website performs as expected on the devices they’re most likely to use.

Implement simple code

To stay future-proofed, you need to be able to update things quickly. Over complicate your codebase and you’re going to struggle to respond quickly to the changing demands and needs of your customers.

Security

As Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon says, “encrypt everything”. Keeping information encrypted so only the intended recipient gets it is one thing, but an SSL certificate on your website will also build trust with your customer community. They want to know that when they purchase through your site, their personal and financial information is safe.

Findable

There are literally millions and millions of websites out there, so how do you know that yours is getting seen? Is it search engine optimised (SEO)? Customers are rarely going to go past the first page of Google in search of a solution fearing a lack of credibility or wasting their time.

Being optimised for search means that your content is in front of customers when they are searching for a solution to the problem that you solve. SEO is a mighty task to tackle and is likely handled by an experienced team of experts for most organisations. If you’re struggling with this one, feel free to get in touch with us, and we can provide some guidance to get your SEO on track.

Make (data) informed decisions

Using data to make informed decisions is paramount to the success of your website. With the right software, you can start collecting valuable information about your customers – find out exactly how they got to your website, how long they stayed and where they left. By knowing this, you can start to optimise your website content to build and nurture your customer base.

How fast is your website?

That short attention span means visitors don’t wait for pages to load, especially on mobile devices where flicking and swiping runs rampant. By using tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom and WebPageTest, you can compare your website speed against others.

A fast site will also have the side benefit of increasing your search rankings. The search engines factor in load time to their algorithms to make sure their brand is delivering a good experience for users. If your website takes more than 2 seconds to load, you will be penalised from humans and robots. Ping!

As an expert-integrated marketing agency, we have helped organisations optimise their websites, drive traffic, and manage a range of other (non-digital) initiatives that have seen their brands grow from a small single office to national brands outperforming their largest competitors. Let us show you how our results-oriented approach can grow your business.