Once your website is live, with your homepage up front, there’s nothing more to do, right?

Wrong!

Things change – internal stuff like your people, products and services; external stuff like new market or industry trends, new web design and functionality, new competitor activity – and your website will date.

With so many people used to today’s slick internet functionality, the worst turn-offs are outdated designs and content, old-fashioned formats, non-responsive websites, difficult text and slow or clunky navigation.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How many times have you left a website because something put you off?

Now we can’t promise one of our websites will open absolutely every door for you – no one could – but we do know they increase sign-up rates (capturing valuable marketing data), increase lead generation and enhance customer engagement far better than many.

And that’s because our websites are conceived, structured, designed and written from a marketing view-point, by marketing professionals. Your new website could do a ‘marketing’ job for you… drawing your new visitors in, ‘talking’ to them and enticing them to take the action you want them to.

It’s a very different approach to the standard web developers ‘focus on technology’ angle, which often results in what is undeniably a technically brilliant website, but one which just doesn’t engage with your audience.

However, regardless of who you’re targeting, you have just 6-7 seconds to capture the interest of a newly landed visitor and to make then stay on your site and you also want them to keep coming back.

So how many of today’s ‘must-haves’ does your homepage feature?

Data capture… are you enticing them to leave you their email address? This could be anything from a webinar registration to an ebook download. And if you have data capture, is it working? Are you getting enough signups?

Follow up… if you’re using data capture, have you got auto-responders in place to keep up the engagement? It takes the pressure off of you and makes your processes look slick!

Readability… use dark text on a white or light background, not white text on black; it’s much easier on the eyes. (And NEVER yellow!). Also does your content flow nicely with well structured sentences?

A most-wanted action (MWA)… show your visitors clearly what you want them to do (and do this on all of your pages, not just the homepage).

Great navigation… with quick click-throughs and short navigation chains; it’s all about getting them to where they need to be, as fast as possible.

Interest, interest, interest… again put yourself in their shoes. Make it engaging, witty, eye-catching; why not add a video? Video can uplift your response rates by as much as 30%.

Web writing… it’s so different to brochure or report style writing. You need to punch those benefits out, cater for your scan and detail readers and get organic SEO in there too.

So rest assured, we never sacrifice the ‘techy’ aspect of a site in favour of the marketing: it has to function technically as well as commercially too.

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