Read the 9 web site strategies below, that if followed, will put you significantly ahead of your competition.
How to build a website strategically
1. 50% of people who buy online through ecommerce-enabled web sites make a purchase using a mobile device. Ensure your website is mobile compliant, which means it looks good on any device. You may hear people use the term “responsive” around this idea.
2. Switch to a Content Management System such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. It will reduce the cost to operate your website and allow you to easily add new features and content without the need for a technical webmaster.
3. Make sure your web site is fast. This helps keep people engaged and it impacts you search engine rankings too.
Test it with: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. Make sure your webmaster updates your content management system and plug-ins to protect against having the website being hacked and knocked down.
4. Smaller images load faster. Be sure to size your graphics so that they don’t take the end user’s web browser a long time to load. This is important for mobile too.
5. Test your web site on multiple browsers. The industry norm is to engineer for the top current browsers minus one version. That includes: Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Also audit mobile browsers and screen sizes.
6. Track your traffic by installing Google Analytics (it’s free) and look at the visitors, sessions (visits), and page views every week. (We look at it daily.) Use this to evaluate what content is valuable to your visitors and produce more of it.
7. HTML is the language that the web is written in. Get to know it, because it will come in handy when you are tweaking articles and positioning images. It’s not hard, and you don’t have to become a code guru. Understanding a little HTML will give you a lot of street cred with your technical staff or contractors as well.
8. Advertise on your own web site. Some people put ads on their content-based web sites to generate income. Instead, develop your own internal ads and promote products and services, and even web site features on your own site.
9. Add share buttons to your web site content. This way, it can easily be shared by site visitor on social media, which will drive more traffic to you. Buttons like the ones below!
