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Building a killer website involves many choices. The main thing to remember when designing is making your visitors happy, and this is especially true when you’re marketing a product or service. You want to make everything as simple as you can so that your potential customers can navigate through your site and get to that “buy” button easily. You also want to make search engine spiders happy by making your navigation simple and clear. They don’t care about colors, but they do care about your design. You’ll see why in a minute.
First, make sure that you have your content right in front of their little beady eyes. Left-hand sidebars in a blog, for example, or a navigation panel on the left side might stop them cold. It depends on how the site template is designed, and today’s SEO-friendly blog templates, such as Thesis, have these problems solved. I’m not going to go into a coding mantra, but I would like to show you some great ways that you can spice up your site for VISITORS. The people you want to care about most.
These 8 aspects of your site are important, and they’re steps you need to consider:
1. Decide on your niche: First think about what you love. Then, go to the Google Keyword Tool and make sure that somebody is searching for information about that niche. If there are at least 10,000 people a month searching for your general theme, such as golf, hunting, knitting. Biking. Or writing, you should be good to go. If you’re planning to sell reindeer hoof covers, you’re going to run into a problem.
2. Do some keyword research: This is highly important because you want to build your site around keyword phrases that have high search volume and low competition: If you’re brand new, searches with less than about 2,000 results are out, as are High and Medium competition terms. Find the best keywords you can, and then, don’t overdo them. Keyword stuffing will get you into trouble. Just write naturally with your main keyword’s phrases in mind.
3. Check out the competition: Part of your market analysis is looking to see who else is doing business in your space. If you’re seeing a full first page of listings at Google from sites like Amazon or other well-respected businesses online, you may want to choose different keywords. Find keywords where there are some sites listed that you’re able to compete with. I’ve seen first page results, just loaded with high-ranking site listings, but one or two sites listed that don’t make a lot of sense. You can get your site into those spots if you are in a position to compete with them. For example, if you have clout in social media, and then build a site, you have some advantages. Use that to boost your new website.
4. Find the Current Design Trends on the Internet: Things change online from one day to the next. Learn what design trends are cool at Pulse. Me. You can sign up with your Facebook login and just read about whatever you’re interested in. But you can also do more market research by noticing the design of the sites you visit. Also, check out other sites in your niche. You want your site to be clean and clear for visitors, but you also want to be unique enough for people to want to see what’s going on at YOUR place, instead of theirs. So, Pulse will give you some insight into the kind of design you want to have.
5. Choose the best website design company: sagesmarketing.com creates impressive work with personalized Website design. Their team of designers and developers has perfected the skill of creating and automating professional, smart, and attractive custom websites. Their knowledge of e-commerce, database creation, interactivity, and search engine behavior all work to gain our client’s unprecedented visibility. At sagesmarketing.com, they begin each project by listening. In fact, the more we know about your company. That is why they spend a lot of time upfront assessing your company and asking all the right questions. Each company Is different, and they know what makes yours tick to create your online “personae”.
6. Choose the best logo designers: Again, don’t be like everyone else. A custom logo for your business is important, as a custom header for your blog. You can get them made for around $250. It’s an amazing place where you post a project and design artists from all over the world compete to win. You may have 50 or more designs to choose from before the contest is over.
7. Site layout: Again, make your layout as simple and uncomplicated as you can. If you have many products on one page, you may want to use jquery to show mini-profiles and even buy buttons when they click a link or mouseover. And keep your navigation simple — NO PAGE SHOULD BE MORE THAN 3 CLICKS FROM HOME.
8. Add social sharing, following, etc.: Make sure that you allow your content to be shared, wherever it’s free content. Paid content on your site, such as membership pages, is another story. You can allow part of it to be shared so that people are teased enough to buy it. But make sure you have not only Like, +1, and Tweet buttons, but also be sure to have “follow me” type buttons on your site so that people who enjoy your content can be your friend or follow you on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. And if your site is highly visual, make sure you add Pinterest buttons, too.
But bookmark this site-building checklist the next time or the first time you build a website. I can’t tell you how many people leave the research part out and just go straight to the build. Big companies NEVER do that. They have to know there’s money in whatever their product is before they produce it. They have to know a book will sell before it’s written, and so on. When Internet marketers build a site without researching first, they often sit scratching their heads because nobody is buying clothes for squirrels and because they can’t get their pages into the Google results.
Take your time, have fun with it, and put some of yourself into the site, too. People want to know that there’s someone likable behind it, someone they can trust, and trust is the #1 component of selling anything at all.
