Your website is your shop window – make it stand out!

In South Africa, over 1 million individuals access the internet everyday. This figure is set to double in the next 5 years due to the much publicised undersea cable currently under construction.

What does this mean for business? The internet is an incredibly powerful, highly cost-effective marketing tool – provided you take advantage of everything available to boost your online presence. An effective website has the ability to boost your sales significantly!

Your goal is to ensure that browsers can find your website easily and ensure that the content you offer not only promotes your products and services, but is enticing enough to motivate future re-visits.

A website works very similarly to a retail shop – you may have many browsers wandering through your shop, taking a look around, but if you display your merchandise in an enticing manner, you will enjoy higher sales.

So your website is your virtual shop-window - how do you achieve success?

The Design

The look of your website needs to tie in with your overall Corporate ID. You should be using the colours that are portrayed within your logo to really emphasise your branding. The layout needs to ideally be as simple as possible – a website that has too many flashy things, buttons in different places and blocks with text all over the home page or down a side margin will confuse the eye resulting in a far more diluted marketing effect than was no doubt originally intended.

Present pages, buttons and information in a logical format and ensure that these elements attract the eye in the order that you intend them to. For example - you would want your visitor to see your logo first, so ensure that it stands out clearly and that its size is reasonably prominent without overpowering the rest of the page, from here your eye should naturally move to the welcome area discussing the services you offer in a nutshell etc. The links to additional pages should be easy to find.

Importantly, the design of your website should allow for later expansion (i.e. being able to add more pages), so that as your business grows or you add more products and services to your business that you are able to portray these reasonably quickly and easily.

The Content

There will always be those visitors who like to read and those who don’t so it is best to cater for both. One good example of this is can be seen on a website that we designed for Ginkgo Landscaping (www.ginkgolandscaping.co.za). Services are listed on each page and each listed service has a quick access link to more information. Although in more elaborate websites where more information is made available, this particular approach may not be possible, it remains imperative to appeal to both preferences and this can be achieved with a little strategic thinking.

Enticing copy is imperative to ensuring your website speaks for you by effectively promoting what you offer in a clear, comprehensive manner. Punctuation, spelling and logical format separate a reasonable website from a really good one and special attention must to be paid to ensuring there is less waffle and more information you feel would help your visitor to take the next step of contacting you for an order, or even just further information.

Search Engine Optimisation

Firstly let’s define ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO for short).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Thanks Wikipedia!

The importance of SEO cannot be stressed enough. Your website must appear within the first 3 pages of a Google search at the very least or your website will only work for you when you drive potential clientele to it through print advertising. This does largely defeat the object of having a website!

Now to ensure that your website ranks closest to the top of the first few pages on an internet search, you need to ensure that the copy content of your website is geared to picking up keywords that potential clients would be likely to use in order to locate your product or service.

If for instance I were looking for a landscaper to revamp my garden I would type in ‘landscaper’, ‘landscape design’, ‘landscaper cape’, ‘residential landscaper’, etc. As a copywriter I need to ensure that these key-words are incorporated into my landscaping client’s website copy. As a standard practice, i-literate checks recent keyword stats relating to the service our clients offer to ensure we incorporate the common words which are being used in searches.

Apart from the copy used on each page, the website developer must have the knowledge and experience to attend to meta-tags and other related back-end stuff. Here they insert key search words and phrases – similar to the ones I use in my copy and this enhances your ‘page ranking’ significantly.

Partnering with an experienced Copywriter, Designer and Developer

Ensuring the company or individuals you choose to assist you to develop a good quality website is of utmost importance - remember this is after all your virtual shop-front, it needs to be perfect!

The copywriter and the designer need to work closely together to achieve an effective end result, the designer needs to understand the limitations the developer may have and overcome challenges to that end and the developer needs to be experienced in setting up simple, as well as advanced websites.

Proper snagging is extremely important. When the developer formats and loads the website, spelling errors etc. often occur. It is important to retain the services of your designer and copywriter to proof the website before it goes live to ensure that everything looks 100% perfect!. All too often I have met clients who have had their website compiled where it clearly falls short in more than one of these essential areas. At i-literate we do offer a comprehensive service to ensure we are able to offer our clients exceptional value for their marketing investment!

Please view our special offer article entitled ‘Free Website Evaluation and Proposal of Solutions’ to arrange your free website evaluation.