Tips to Improve Your Website in 2015

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tips to improve

Now that the holiday is over and a fresh new year looms ahead, consider it a great time to give your company’s site a facelift. If you want to improve your site’s performance, now is the time to attack this challenge head on.

1. Improve the Design

Minimalism is the way to go based on current design trends. Gone are the days of animated gif and scrolling texts that do nothing but eat bandwidth and distract the user from the main content. Flat designs are replacing the old habits. This means eliminating the gradients and the shadows and replacing them with bright minimal color for better user experience. This also help pages load faster and conserve bandwidth.

2. Mobile Responsiveness

The Internet is no longer monopolized by desktop pc users. To assume that most users still use fancy desktops every time they view websites is a very unproductive assumption. A great number of users are now using their smart phones to surf the Internet. These users demand content that is viewable in their small screens. To neglect mobile responsiveness is to turn away a huge number of potential customers. To adapt with the mobile revolution, make sure that your website is responsive.

3. Improve Your Layout

Imagine a homepage brimming with information overload, information that is otherwise presented in an overwhelming manner to create “relevance” or at least a projection of it. What is the usual users’ reaction? The user’s usual initial reaction to a busy homepage is to leave. The user’s brain and patience can only take so much information. Overloading the user with content will just force the user’s brain to shut down and refuse any more information being offered. Add the fact that the user is most likely using a smartphone with a small screen, the content overload is just too much to take. Consider placing your content in a manner that enhances user experience rather than overwhelms them. Consider placement of white spaces to give the user breathing rooms. This is particularly useful for mobile users.

4. Social Media

Most companies nowadays use the social media to engage users and build brand recognition and credibility. The purpose of engaging in social media is to get people to visit your site. This they do when you engage them enough in the platform where they feel most comfortable, which is social media. If your company has no presence in social media, then it is losing potential customers simply because the customers are on social media while your company is not. Having a website is not enough. An effective social media presence is what drive the users to visit the site.

5. Content Is King

In this age of SEO, page rankings and link exchanges, nothing delivers more traffic and conversion than true and relevant content. The key to website performance is the delivery of fresh and unique contents that would make your users voluntarily share them to other users. The promise of a high-quality content would make the users return to your site repeatedly. This is what gives a site better page ranking and hence, higher conversion rates.