Web Development
WordPress provides a good entry level option for creating an online presence. WordPress websites provide a customisable framework that can solve many of the online issues faced by small and medium businesses.
Types of Sites
When building a website for the first time, the question you should be asking yourself is, what kind of website do I want? There are three major types of websites. These two are:
- eCommerce websites
- Lead Generators
- Custom websites.
Leads Generators
Lead generating websites don’t sell anything online. Meaning, a client won’t physically pay for a product or service on your website, rather they’d submit a contact form or click a phone number. These are all classified as leads.
Leads can be tracked in Google Analytics. An old fashioned way of tracking leads would be to redirect a user from the contact us page to a thank you page. That way you can track all users following that exact flow as a possible lead. However, there are now more modern ways of tracking leads, these are called events. Events are fired to Google Analytics and provide feedback on what the user just did. These events have different categories and values. They’re also able to fire without a page refresh, so if a user submits a from, you can track events without refreshing the entire page.
You might want to know what it’s important to capture leads as events? Well, if you do this, you’re able to see a bunch of things in Google Analytics. Here are a few examples:
- How well do your ads work.
- What is the conversion rate on ad campaigns.
- How do you acquire users and which funnel converts the best, eg. organic vs paid.
- What city of suburb is providing the most leads?
- Compare any two date/time ranges to see if you received more or less leads. This can be used to manage KPIs.
- See on which device you’re receiving more leads. Mobile or desktop. That way you know where to focus more.
- Classify leads into categories. If you need to buy more products on employ more staff to service your leads, categorise them so you know what skills to employ.
Custom Websites
At SwiftCom, we’re able to develop complete custom websites. Our preferred framework for this is Gatsby. We’re covered this topic in more detail here.
Important Features on a Website
Mobile Friendly
Visitors browsing from their phones increase every day. Think of it this way, if you’re in a restaurant with a few friends and someone tells you about a new company or thing you haven’t heard about, what is the first thing you’ll most likely do? You’ll probably grab your phone and do a Google search. Your first impression of this company or thing is therefore a mobile experience.
If you don’t focus on mobile experience, like so many others, you’re losing out big time. We’ve seen websites where mobile accounts for around 80% of the traffic. Furthermore, mobile conversions could be on par with desktop conversions, so having a bad mobile experience can cost you a lot in sales.
Good Analytics
As mentioned earlier, you should definitely focus on tracking events in Google Analytics. Other important things to look at is in page-Analytics. You might think users are clicking on things a lot, but it might not always be the case. You can use in-page Analytics with Google to check where users are clicking.
Think like the User and Plan Your Site
One of the most difficult things to building a website is to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors. Not to worry though, this is something we specialise in. We’ve worked in so many industries and built so many websites, we know what your users are looking for.
When building a website, you should make sure that it’s able to sell your service the same way you would. You need to explain everything clearly using graphics, good content, video’s, etc. A website is a salesman that never goes to bed. This salesman is able to sell your product 24/7/365, provided it’s not offline. If you don’t plan your website properly and you’re unable to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors, your ads and organic campaigns will simply not convert.
We’ve seen people that spend hours trying to get users to their sites. However, when you get there, the website lacks many basic things. Think of all the questions someone has before buying your product or service. Does your website sensibly answer all those questions? If not, it might not be converting optimally, users might even think that your product is incapable of certain things due to missing information on your website. Premium content writing is also very important.
Be Found
You could have the best website out there, but if you’re not servicing an industry or not filling any content gaps, your chances of being found could be very slim.
Common mistakes people make when building a website is to put multiple services on the same page. Single scrolling home pages is also a very bad idea because it drastically reduces your chances of being found. This is way a great website layout and sitemap is very important. Things on your website should optimally link together.
We covered the SEO topic in more detail here.
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