1. Determine your purpose and build accordingly
- Set the goals for your website
- What does it need to do?
- Drive traffic from the web to your business?
- Build awareness about a particular topic or organization?
- Just sell your products?
2. Know your customer
- Discover your target market’s demographics
- Age group? Young or old?
- Are they comfortable with technology?
- Where are they? Do they have access to fast internet?
- This will help you when you’re optimizing loading speed
- Mobile or Desktop user?
3. Put yourself in their shoes
- When designing your website, think about what your customer would like to see
- Is it user friendly and easy to navigate?
- Does your landing page have the pertinent info they’re looking for without having to scroll?
- Is it consistent throughout the site with Colors, Themes and Tonality in text?
4. Just the facts, ma'am
- Trust and credibility are the foundation of lasting customer relationships
- Have 3rd party reviews and customer testimonials featured prominently
- Utilize an “About Us” section to display pictures and bios of employees
- This helps “humanize” your staff in the eyes of your customers
5. Make your website delUXe
- User Experience, or UX, is paramount for customer retention
- Your goal should be to have the best-looking website, per your customer’s expectations, that will drive the most sales
- This depends on your target customer
- Their needs and wants
- Location
- Reason for coming to your website
- Capabilities and web skills
6. Working out the kinks
- Optimization of your site will maximize its efficiency, as well as your profits
- Use the ‘F12’ key to open up the Developer Tool
- Shows loading speed of web pages
- Test it on different browser types
- View as a Desktop or Mobile device
- Finding out what works best for your customer may take some time
- Incorporate A/B Testing to find out what your customer likes the best
- Heat Mapping will help determine the optimum positioning of content and how well it is working
- Use the ‘F12’ key to open up the Developer Tool
Hi Jeff,
I think it’s really awesome how you took what we learned in class and applied it to you blog! The first thing I noticed is how appealing it is to the eye. Everything is very well spaced out and organized which made me really want to keep reading. Your “know the customer” and “working out the kinks” sections were my favorite. Your “know the customer” section touched a couple of the same points I did in my blog such as knowing the age and are they comfortable with technology. If just anyone were to pull up your blog and read “working out the kinks” they would have a pretty solid idea of how to maximize their websites efficiency.