Business Start-ups - 10 points to consider before developing your new Website?

​If you are in the design and development stage of your new website, there are a few key things to consider:

1. Ensure that the website you build is desktop and mobile friendly as more than 70% of website visitors now come directly from mobile!
2. Before you start creating your website, it is a good idea to create a diagram that shows the structure of your website - including the proposed content, navigation and layout of your webpages.
3. ​Decide on your colour theme, fonts, graphics and page layouts and ensure they are simple, and consistent throughout your website. 
4. You need to ensure your site to easy for visitors to navigate around and as user-friendly as possible.  Don't make users navigate through too many layers of your website to find the information they want.
5. Ensure that your pages load as fast as possible – visitors don’t wait for slow loading pages. Simple steps can be taken to ensure your pages load faster, including ensuring that your images are optimised for web and ensuring that all your links work.  Images taken on your mobile phone must be optimised for the web before adding them to your website.
6. Writing for the web is very different from writing for print.  People only skim read on the internet and spend less than 15 seconds on your website, so make sure you give them everything they are looking for in as few words as possible.
7. When adding links to your website ensure they work. Broken links show visitors and search engines such as Google that a site is not maintained and your search engine rankings will begin to fall.
8. Avoid using “click here” links, instead make the link clear by saying something like - Find out more about our user-friendly websites. The visitor then knows what they will find when clicking on the link.
9. The Equality Act 2010 makes it illegal for a website provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service that is generally available. There are some simple adjustments you can make to your website to make it easier for disabled people to use including attaching a text description (alt tags) to every image and link on the site. This means that blind users, who rely on a browser that reads out the contents of the webpage, can hear a description of what an image is and where a link will take them.
10. Your website is your "online marketing brochure" so make sure you add your contact details. Some people prefer to pick up the phone, others prefer to email and some like to fill in a form – so offer a number of ways for visitors to get in touch with you.
11. Finally, ensure that you get someone to check the spelling on your website before you set it live. Even the best people can add “adn” instead of “and”.  People do judge websites and businesses by the quality of their spelling.

​If you would like help in building your website or online marketing brochure then please get in touch with Sunflowerva.