To make sure your website works for you, follow these six key points to an effective website:

1. Make Sure It’s Consistent

Your site should reflect key elements of your brand identity, it should reflect the corporate look and feel of your business and be consistent across all your marketing communications. Keeping your brand consistent across all forms of media is vitally important and reaffirms what you’re about.

2. Usability

It is important that users find your site easy to use to get the most out of their visit. Things to consider here include ensuring the navigation is simple, logical and consistent and that all links are working properly, that there is the right information on each page and that if you have any forms on your site, they are working correctly. These factors amongst others will ensure visitors stay longer and are more likely to return.

3. Text Legibility

It is important that fonts used on your site are sized correctly so that the text can be read easily on different browsers and different platforms (and you should also consider making sure that text can be resized by visitors). It is also worth noting that the text on your site should be significantly darker than the background colour, so that it can easily be read, bearing in mind that some visitors could be colour blind or visually impaired in another way. You should therefore ensure that text is easy to read, logically laid out and that text doesn’t interfere with any images on your site.

4. Style with Substance

Make sure that your site is well designed, it looks good and gets your message across. By keeping it simple and stylish with lots of high quality, relevant content you are well on the way to creating a website that will bring you the results you need. Do not be underestimated the skills of a professional website design team who can provide you with a range of options and will ensure that your site meets both your brand requirements and your online objectives.

5. Website Speed

It is crucial that your site is quick to load and quick to navigate as visitors always want access to the information you provide quickly. By ensuring graphics on your site are optimised and the site written with clean code, it ensures that wait time

is kept to a minimum. The longer visitors have to wait for your site to load or to get around, the more likely they are to leave – and they are far less likely to return in the future.

6. Make Friends with Search Engines

It’s no good having a great looking website, packed with lots of relevant well laid out information if nobody can find it. And if people can’t find your site, then the chances of receiving enquiries about the products / services you offer are slim. So what can you do to make the leading search engines like your site? Here are a few quick tips amongst the many things we can recommend:

Firstly it is important to have the text within your site coded in HTML rather than embedded with the graphics or images. Search engines cannot read text within images so keep them separate. Instead, use ALT tags on images as search engines do consider these and they do have an impact on your search engine ranking. Also, include meta tags and descriptions within your code ahead of submitting your site to the leading search engines – many of which will list your site for free. Consider submitting your site to online directories and work hard a developing the number of inbound links your site has too.

By ensuring that your website is well-designed, logically laid out, quick to load and looks good, you are well on your way to ensuring that visitors to your site will enjoy their visit whilst getting their hands on the information you provide. Your website is a crucial business and marketing tool – make sure your site is working as hard as you are.