An effective website is easy on the eyes, delivers good content to your readers regularly, has a search engine presence and is easy to traverse through. Here are some tips to help you create an effective website.
- Content. Keep it updated regularly. This is the only way to make people come back to your site again and again. A question that is often asked is: how often do I update? The answer is as often as you have something valuable to share. Don’t just update for the sake of updating.
- Design. Don’t think that a huge header graphic is a necessity. Having a large image at the top of your site can slow your load time. Having a fast loading site is key. Your text should be easy to read. Add images to your site. Have an overall aesthetically pleasing design.
- Search engine optimization. Be as descriptive and concise as you can in your title. Use keywords in your title and again sporadically in your content.
- Broken links. As soon as a visitor hits a broken link they are likely to leave your website. You can use a free online tool like brokenlinkcheck.com to look for 404 file not found errors. A good tip for not having these errors on your site is to never delete a page. You can choose to not link to a page anymore but never delete it.
- 404 page. Just in case you do have 404 errors, users should be redirected to a 404 page. This page should tell them that they’re attempting to reach a page that doesn’t exist. Give them an option of emailing the site owner to let them know about it or to visit the home page.
- Navigation. Your goal is to make your surfers visit, click around and eventually buy something. The longer they stay on your site the more likelier they are to buy something or to visit your site again in the future. The only way to make them stay a long time is to provide great content and easy navigation. Good navigation in a wordpress blog should have categories, tags and links to popular posts. This creates a user friendly site so your visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly.
