A Home (Page) Remodeling Job – Your Website Makeover

ou may have something critical in your office that you haven’t dusted off since 2007 that may be adversely affecting your customers’ ability to do business with you.

No, it’s probably not the top of your credenza, but it may be your organization’s website on your office computer.

If this is the case, you may want to consider rebuilding the main vehicle many of your customers use to find out the location, hours, products, services and other important information about your business.

You now have tools available to you that may not have been as popular a dozen or more years ago when you first constructed your site, like a content management system (CMS).

What is a CMS?

A software program that allows for easy editing and maintenance of your website, a CMS may free you from the chains to a third party when it comes time to edit or add pages to your website. (Something you may have been putting off for years.) Examples of popular CMS programs include WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

You may even want to consider a simple, easy-to-use, web-based website publishing tool and hosting site like Squarespace, which can allow you to do everything yourself right from the start.

5 Web Design Best Practices

As you reconstruct that all-important virtual portal to your parking facility, here are five web design best practices to keep in mind, as suggested by Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good.

1) Have a simple, visually powerful homepage design, using large images and minimal text. For instance, Squarespace offers templates which embody this best practice. Just plug in your text! Also, instead of links, use icons and buttons to make them stand out.

2) Format text for easy reading. Limit paragraphs to two to four sentences.

3) Limit the layout to two columns. One column takes up two-thirds of the page, and is used for content stories. The second column is for navigation and graphics.

4) Mega tags provide information about your website like page description, keywords, the author of the document, and when the webpage was last modified, but are not displayed. Because mega tags have been abused by so many shifty search engine optimization (SEO) ‘experts’ over the past ten years, search engines are increasingly giving higher priorities to page titles instead of mega tags to generate search results. Therefore, every page of your website should have a unique title.

5) Host your blog inside your website. Why? Every time you publish and then promote a blog post, the blog drives traffic to your website. And the more content you publish under your website URL, the higher your business will rank in search engine results. Fresh blog content gets priority over static web pages.

Two Tricks to Aid Your SEO Efforts

92% of consumers looking for local businesses start with an Internet search. 90% of people conducting an internet search will not go past page one of the search engine results. (They’ll conduct a second keyword search instead.) So here are two additional simple actions you can take to increase the chances of your website being found in a favorable position after an Internet search are:

1) FAQs. Include a frequently asked questions page on your website as a way to answer typical real-life questions that your customers want to know about. It’s also great for SEO because you can add keyword-rich sentences to your website. Just ask your employees, “What are the questions we get repeatedly from our customers?” Your customers may end up finding this to be the most useful feature of your website.

2) A resource page can provide useful information to readers, and can contain not only those all-important keywords your customers are searching for but also links to the websites of nearby businesses and attractions. Again, not only can this be useful to the search engines to get you better placement, but it can also help your human visitors as well. Further, if you can get links from one or more of these websites back to your own, this action can be mutually beneficial for the websites of both businesses.

Remodeling your neglected website may be a lot easier (and more fun) than you ever imagined. By doing so, you can improve your Internet search engine rankings. But more importantly, you can provide better and more complete information to the customers you are here to serve.

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