If you’ve added and tried out fifty themes on your WordPress website, and then thought to yourself this still doesn’t look good then listen up!
You don’t need to have a pretty website to be successful in business.
Having a background in web design and having run a successful web design business for the past six years, you might think I’m crazy right about now.
But it’s the truth. Granted, websites still need to look professional but there are more important pressing issues that should grab your attention first.
Let’s look at what things you should really focus on with your website. Don’t get stuck for months and months on choosing the perfect font to compliment your logo!
# 1 – Knowing Who You Serve
A lot of people skip the step of getting to know their ideal audience but this step is crucial and should not be skipped. Knowing your ideal customer deeply will change your entire business, and how you do business (as it should).
Why? Well, because you’ll always have your customer on your mind. You’ll think about the things that they worry about before buying something from you. You’ll think about where they’re getting stuck in the process and come up with solutions to help them along in their journey.
Getting to know your customer better isn’t something that needs to happen in year one of your business. It’s something that needs to happen over and over again. I’m in year seven of being in business and I still learn new things about my favorite people to work with every single day.
Take some time out on a regular basis to ask some questions and get to know your audience better. Doing this will help you to create an effective website that will work really well for you even if it’s not the prettiest website on the block.
# 2 – Readability
When people come to your website, it should be really easy to read or you’ll lose them.
And when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), the last thing you want to happen is for people to find your awesome blog post or product then leave within seconds because your font is too small. Or leave because you don’t have any headers to make your post or website easily scannable.
Bump up that font to at least 16px and add in some headers to text-heavy paragraphs. (Please keep in mind that this depends on your font but start there and adjust accordingly.)
Also, take a look at the Yoast SEO plugin, as it makes suggestions to improve your sentences. This will help to make your writing easier to digest and is also super helpful for your readers.
Your audience will thank you. And your website will work better too.
# 3 – Usability
Your website should be suuuuper easy to use.
This is something that you constantly need to look at because it’s easy to have a broken link or forms that no longer work. By taking some time to regularly go through your website and make adjustments, as far as usability is concerned, you’ll keep on top of how well your site works for your reader or potential customer.
Here are a few things that you can take a look at:
- Do I have any broken links?
- Are all my buttons working?
- Do I have any forms that I no longer need or that don’t sync with my email provider?
- Can people easily contact me or follow me on social media?
- Is my website clear with what actions I want my ideal customer to take next?
- Is it easy to purchase a product or service? Can I make any part of the check out process easier?
Answer these questions on a regular basis to make sure that you’re on top of how easy your site is to use. You can even consider asking friends to test out your website to get feedback on what’s working and what needs a little bit of help.
# 4 – Having Products or Services That Help Your Ideal Customers
You always need to have a call-to-action that leads to your products or services (or to your email list that leads to your products or services). And your website is your 24-hour salesperson, or at least it should be.
These products or services also need to be built with your ideal customer in mind. Think back to who your ideal reader/potential customer is. How you can uniquely help this person with something that you offer?
This will help you to avoid making products/services that are not fit for your audience.
Also, take a look at your existing products or services and see if there is anything you can do to make your offering more clear and easy to understand the benefit.
# 5 – Getting People Back To Your Website/Offerings
After you’ve created your website, you can’t forget to get people back to your website.
There are a lot of ways to get people back to your website but you have to make sure that you are consistently marketing and driving traffic to your website or blog to have any sort of success online.
If you struggle with ideas on how to market your website/offerings, I have a free 5-day challenge to create your marketing plan that you can join here. In this challenge, you’ll work on getting to know your ideal customer, choosing your offer or promotion that you’d like to focus on for the next couple of months, making sure that your website is up to speed, breaking your tasks down into simple steps, and then creating your marketing plan.
Whatever you do, you want to make sure that you are consistently working towards bringing people back to your website. I like to use blog posts and videos on YouTube as a way to get people back to my own website.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how beautiful or well-designed your website is. All that truly matters is if your website is working for you.
I always suggest to my coaching clients and students to focus on these things and not get stuck in the little details of how their websites work.
Have you worked on any of these things when it comes to your website? Is there anything that you’ve missed? Let me know in the comment section below!
