Your company's website is making first impressions with potential customers 24/7. Forbes Advisor published its top website statistics for 2024 and reported that users form an opinion about a website in 0.05 seconds, and 61% leave a site if they don't find what they're looking for in about five seconds. Karen Carlson, web content and SEO strategist at Levi Ray & Shoup, a global technology services company, says a website is a reflection of your company, and agrees that viewers formulate an impression of your company in only seconds.
To make a good first impression, Mark Roberts III, founder of GoWeb1, a full-service web development company, says a company needs to know its brand, its audience and the goal of the website, ideally, prior to building or updating a website. Once a website is available on the internet, it needs to be kept current, functional and relevant.
Pre-planning
Denny Cave, designer and developer at Cave Interactive Media, a WordPress website and web application development company in Williamsville, recommends answering some preliminary questions before writing content. Who is the intended audience, and why will they visit your company's website? What are their expectations and preferences, such as larger fonts, for example? Carlson says a company needs to know its customer's pain points and address them in the content of the website.
Roberts says businesses should focus on having a brand and branding guidelines. The logo should guide the selection of a website theme that will convey the look and feel of the organization. Ultimately, this supports the specific goal of a website, which is to market the company's products and services to the target audience.
Hiring a website development company
The next stage is to hire a website development company to bring your vision to life. Carlson emphasizes the importance of investing in your website developer because the "website is the most valuable marketing tool — the nucleus of the marketing environment."
All marketing efforts should feed into the website, and it should be beautiful and load quickly. The content needs to be current and relevant. Cave suggests clarifying your "all-in" cost so that you're not lured in by a low initial fee.
Once a site is built, it needs to be hosted, maintained and monitored against security threats. Staff will need training on how to use the new site. These are some of the costs that could be added to the initial fee.
When evaluating website developers, Cave recommends asking the following:
•Can the developer make your website ADA compliant?
•Does the developer keep abreast of privacy laws regarding collecting customer information?
•What website performance metrics are monitored and how frequently?
•How experienced is the developer with hosting and recovering a site once it has gone down?
•Are backups conducted daily (hourly for e-commerce sites), and are backups stored on a data center separate from the website to protect from catastrophic loss?
•What are the security measures?
•Do you have the option to move your website if you're not happy with the developer's hosting?
•Can your company own your domain?
Ask about search engine optimization strategies.
Testing versions of the website
Before the first version of the website is ready to test, form a team of staff who have different roles and functions within the organization. This team will be tasked with finding its way around the website from a new user's perspective.
Roberts says that customers utilize websites as a tool to do their due diligence and grasp some understanding of what a company is about before they decide to engage in business with them. Websites should answer common product and service questions. The team should check content accuracy, select hyperlinks, applications and other forms to make sure they function as intended.
Ready to launch
Carlson says, "My biggest advice is to look at website content and make certain it is updated." Once the project is complete, promote the new website and make monitoring its performance and updating content a continuous process.
Feed all other marketing channels into the website. New features such as a blog, podcast, chatbot or drone video can be added to make the website more intriguing. The first impression of a website should be aesthetically pleasing and an overall easy experience.
Moving forward, refresh web designs every two to three years. Make a plan to meet with your web developer for updates, earmark money in the marketing budget for adding features and schedule the team to test the site as it best suits your business.
It sounds like a lot of work, but Carlson says working on your website should be a fun and rewarding experience. Businesses of all sizes should have a full website experience, one of beauty and elegance.