Website Development – Top 10 Tips When Creating a New Website
Website development has evolved to meet the consumer usability demands and search engine findability requirements. For more than fifteen years, KC Web Specialists has been helping businesses throughout Kansas City and nationally, stay visible and relevant with progress web design and professional website development. Our extensive experience has given us insight into what can make your website more productive.
Whether you are creating a brand-new website or starting a website redesign project, focusing on clients local to Kansas City or nationally, there are key components to consider. To keep it simple, we have compiled our top 10 tips.
Top 10 Website Development Tips
- Website purpose – It is important that you know the purpose of your website before you create or re-design your website. Common purposes are: education, advocacy, online shopping, explain services, and collect community data. Although your website might serve more the one purpose, it is essential that you identify the main purpose, as this will govern the final design and content.
- Target audiences – A website cannot be designed for “everyone.” Countless website development projects start with the desire to reach the largest audience possible. The reality is you accomplish more of your goals when you design a website to target your top 2 audiences. Consider who uses your services or needs your information as one group and those who come in contact with your target audience as the other group. This will drive how site visitors will navigate your site and the kind of content your site contains.
- Call-to-Action (Site objectives) – Ask for what you want. Tell them where to go on the website. If you are promoting an event, place that predominately on the home page and remind them throughout the child pages. The action you want visitors to take should support the purpose of your website.
- Features – Make your website dynamic and interesting! Once you figure out what you want them to do on your site, establish the “how”. You can use call-to-action banners, donation buttons, online forms, embedded video or podcasts, social media buttons/integration, or any other widget that keeps your audience clicking.
- Responsive design – Over 80% of today’s consumers are surfing the internet using a mobile device. Responsive means the website adjusts for optimal viewing based on the device used for browsing. This is not “mobile-friendly” or a “mobile app”, which was how older websites were designed. Nor does a responsive website designed for a desktop user. Today’s websites are designed to be adaptive for all site visitors and viewing devices.
- Fresh content – When people visit your website you want to give them a reason to return. Search engines use a site’s traffic when ranking similar websites. Website development that overlooks the importance of having a content strategy, could be a waste of time and money. Make sure your content strategy includes updating images, links, and articles monthly, if not weekly, and that you have a plan for telling your target audience when you make changes.
- Engaging content – Avoid overloading your website with content! Your website should provide various ways to get to and highlight key points. Break large amounts of information into smaller blocks of text, add photos that communicate meaning, use videos, and link key words between pages. You want your audience to “engage” with your site, not skim it and leave.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) – More than half of Internet users start with a search engine. How many times have you been told to “just Google it” in the last week? So if you want people to find your website, your website development needs to include a solid SEO strategy.
- Site maintenance – A good website design is great – a well maintained website is FANTASTIC! Once your site is built and “live” on the internet you still need to make sure that the site is secure from hackers, plugins and database versions are current and up to date, keywords and content are hitting/trending or adjusted if they are not, and so on. If you don’t have a staff member skilled in website maintenance, you may want to consider hiring a professional like KC Web Specialists to handle the maintenance for you.
- Accessibility – This refers to Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Basically, we are talking about making your website accessible to those with disabilities. Larger fonts, language translations, button content labels, image descriptors, etc. all make your website accessible all site visitors.
Website development, when done with these tips in mind, will result in a purposeful and useful website. We can say this because we have been helping businesses with all their website needs; feel free to visit our reviews. When you need a Kansas City website development company, trust KC Web Specialists to get results.
(913) 489-7866, ext. 107
Overland Park, Kansas
KC Web Specialists Marketing Office | KC Web Specialists Accounting Office |
1475 Walnut Street, Suite 16 | 401 W. Frontier Ln, Suite 200A |
Kansas City, Missouri 64106 | Olathe, Kansas 66061 |
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