• Admin
• Jul 03, 2024
• Advertising

Factors to Consider When Building a Professional Website

Empowering your brand in the digital age calls for development of a great website. A website serves as a very important and necessary tool to let potential customers know of your existence, products and services that you offer. Also, having a well-designed website can act as an effective marketing tool that will attract new clients and heighten your brands reputation. This article highlights some of the primary factors to consider when developing a professional website.

If you are a client seeking to have a professional website built for you, here is a checklist that you should consider to ascertain that your website is professionally done.

1. Is it visually appealing?
2. How is the user experience?
3. Is it mobile friendly?
4. How is the speed of the website?
5. Is it optimized for search engines?

Design

It is common knowledge that first impressions matter a lot. The impression that visitors get when they first visit speaks volumes on how they will perceive your brand. When you have a visually appealing design, there are high chances that they will be encouraged to explore the website further.

When talking about the design and aesthetics of a website, there are several things that should be put under consideration. Some of these factors comprise of the layout and structure, color scheme, topography, images and graphics.

A well designed professional website should have a clean and well organized layout. This is important as it helps visitors to easily navigate the site. The choice of color is also vital. It is important to ensure that the colors used reflect the identity of your brand and ultimately creates a cohesive look. Regarding topography, it is crucial to choose fonts that are easy to read and complement the style of your brand. Lastly, the use of high quality images and creative graphics can play a significant role in making your website visually appealing.

Usability

One outstanding factor in determining if a website is professional enough is if you can answer the question is user experience amazing?

A professional website is one that prioritizes the user experience (UX). This can be achieved by focusing on the needs of the targeted visitors.

The user experience can be enhanced by ascertaining that the navigation in place is logical; content is organized into categories or sections and easy to use. Additionally, the content should be presented in a clear and readable format. Images should be used within content to break up text and keep users engaged. Moreover, it is integral to incorporate interactive elements to encourage user engagement. Some of the interactive elements that can be employed in improving UX are buttons, forms and sliders.

Responsiveness

A decade ago, people used to visit cyber cafes when they want to access any service on the internet. However, in the contemporary society, nearly every potential customer has access to a mobile device. Research shows that many people around the world access the internet more using mobile phones compared to any other devices.

How People Access the Internet (2024 Statistics)

Device	Share of Users
Mobile phone (any)	92.3%
Laptop or desktop (any)	65.6%
Smartphone	91%
Feature phone	5.2%
Tablet device	27.3%
Own laptop or desktop	59.1%
Work laptop or desktop	28.6%
Connected television	31.9%
Smart home device	15.4%
Games console	12.7%

 

The chart above is a clear indication that prioritizing mobile friendly websites is not something that is up for bargain. A professional website should be responsive enough to adapt to different screen sizes. Mobile usability can be attained by ensuring that your site uses flexible grid layouts that are responsive to all devices. The images should also be scalable while maintaining quality across varied devices.

Last but not least, the website should have touch friendly elements such as buttons and forms; large enough to be easily tapped on mobile devices. 

Speed

The internet is like an open air market, always remember that you are not alone. When a user finds issues with your website, they are always quick to jump to another website. One of the things that can make users quickly close your website and move on to the next site is speed. Website speed not only affects the user experience but also SEO. Websites that load slowly often have higher bounce rates and dissatisfied users. These factors will in turn negatively affect the SEO of your site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Having a website that is visually appealing, has good user experience, its mobile friendly and has a fast speed is not all to consider it professional enough. It will be meaningless if the site is not discoverable and doesn’t rank in search engines like google, bing and yahoo among others.

A professional website should be well optimized for search engines. SEO is a giant in professional website development as it ensures that a website ranks well and acquires organic traffic. Below is a checklist for a professional website that is optimized for search engines:

1. On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO entails optimizing elements that are found within the website such as Meta tags, content quality, headings, URLs and internal links.

1. Off-Page SEO

On the other hand, Off-Page SEO entails improving external factors outside the website to improve its performance in search engines. These factors comprise of building authoritative backlinks, social media engagement and acquiring brand mentions.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO entails optimizing the infrastructure of a website to improve how search engines crawl and index your site. Below is a checklist of things that you should consider when conducting technical SEO. 

• XML Sitemap: Submit an XML sitemap to search engines to help them discover and index your pages efficiently.
• Robots.txt File: Use a robots.txt file to control search engine access to specific pages or directories on your site.
• Structured Data: Implement structured data (schema markup) to provide search engines with additional context about your content, enhancing rich snippets in search results.