While every business out there knows that you’ll need an effective website to function as the centerpiece of your web presence, it’s also valuable to know that just having one isn’t enough.
An effective website is one that stands apart, one that’s held to a high standard by users and often pointed to for comparison when they encounter pages that are lacking. Identifying a checklist for your own web design to follow can help you to be that trendsetter, which can give you all of the advantages you expect from a website and more.
Function as a Business Hub
If a potential customer is trying to conduct some research about your brand, then they should be able to find everything that they need through your website. If information is missing, you don’t want them to have to go scouring through your social media posts for something that may or may not be there. This means that the information doesn’t only have to be present, but it also has to be obvious where it can be found.
Say, for instance, that they’re hoping to find some information about where your business stands in relation to sustainability in its products. They might instinctively go to the ‘about’section of your website, maybe hoping to find a subsection that lays out your values in greater detail. Having these sections can allow you to create an image of your brand, giving audiences an impression of what sets you apart.
Showcase the Best of Your Brand
To those who are discovering your brand for the first time, this marks an excellent opportunity for you to showcase why they should stick around. This doesn’t just mean having social proof here through social media snippets and customer reviews, but also through showing rather than telling. APIs are often an effective way of doing this – demonstrating your technological talent and proving that you’re competent in digital languages.
However, in order to ensure that these efforts go off without a hitch, you need to make sure that you’re implementing APIs properly. That means that it’s especially important to consider the unique kind of API security that you need to make sure data remains secure throughout the entire usage of them.
Invite Further Investigation
What you’re trying to do, when someone who was previously unfamiliar with your brand begins to explore your website, is encourage them to look further. That means that you need a great home page that dazzles users with just the right amount of impressive visuals, but it also means that the other sections should prove equally inviting. You don’t want to put them off at any point, and that can create a precarious balancing act.
For example, when it comes to deciding how much detail to go into on any given topic, you need to make sure that you’re including enough without flooding the page with text. You can get around this by having links within smaller paragraphs where a customer can learn more, putting it out of the way, but obviously available.