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Hi I'm Dr. Digital. Welcome back if you've just joined us
I'm also sometimes known as Polly McGee but that's my screen and coaching name.
This is website fundamentals part 2. If you've just joined us here well you can
nick back and have a look at part 1 any time we did an intro then. This one we're
looking at what makes a website compelling. In the web fundamentals
series we're really covering off step by step on all the basics that are going to
help you get an awesome website not just awesome for you but awesome for your
customers. So what does make a compelling website? Just take a moment to think
about what your experience is with websites and what are some of the things
that make you really stick around when you land on a website. Certainly our
design aesthetics have changed radically from the really early days of coding
when we had those crazy websites with all their colors absolutely packed with
information also often incredibly hard to read we've moved to a much cleaner
smoother design and we've really started nailing some of the aesthetics of human
behavior and human vision that work out how we like to consume and what makes us
best stay on a website. So imagining that you haven't got one of those rad early
two-thousands websites and is sitting somewhere in the pantheon of relatively
modern ones. One of the first things I think that is really necessary with a
website in fact it's the first thing that's going to get you there is, is it
findable? So basically that means that you need to have a look at your SEO.
What's SEO? Search Engine Optimisation. Again if you haven't got your head
around SEO you can head back to the digital ready website anytime we've got
extensive fact sheets and blogs and videos there that'll explain it all to
you. It's pretty fundamental because what you need is for Google and we always
talk about Google because it is still the world's biggest search engine. For
their algorithms to be able to find your website when someone searches for it or
searches for keywords around your business or searches in a mobile on a
mobile phone in a location near you. So that's pretty important. It can't be
compelling if no one can find it so the first thing you need to do
make sure that you've got your SEO right. Now there's quite a lot of ways of doing
that and certainly one of them is using a really simple tool that can help you
work out what your SEO is like there's one called
SEO quake you can just google that and that gives you a diagnostic that can run
through for your business. So actually getting people there is the first step.
Depending on the type of website you've had built and we're going to cover that
off in heaps of depth later on sometimes they have really fantastic SEO built
into them and that's really what you really want sometimes you have to put it
in yourself so it's a matter of knowing what the keywords are and making sure
you've got all your headings and your heading levels right. I'm not going to go
into that in too much detail in this series but just to know it's something
we'll talk about a bit more when we talk about website design. So search engine
optimisation is really the first step because it's going to get people to land
on that homepage of yours. And what happens when they get there? Research
shows us that people stay on websites for around four seconds
sometimes a little bit more but that's the average length of time from landing
on a site to jumping off so you want to get back beyond that four a second mark
and one of the ways to do it is by having really great navigation. When I
talk about navigation it refers to where your menu is and when you click on that
menu how it flows. That navigation has to be logical for a user as I said in the
first part of this series it's not about how you would curate your business and
how you would put your files together. It's about the natural progression of
the story you're telling on that site that leads people to the purpose of your
website. Let's say it's a transactional website maybe you're an e-commerce store
and you're selling something. So what that means is that that menu has to
naturally, elegantly and easily and quickly get people from landing there to
understanding what you're doing and then take them to a place where they can
transact. So you need to think about where your menus are and what actually
sits in them. Now the general school of thought these
days is you don't want to have much more than three levels on your website. What I
mean by that is you want to have a heading level that you might click on
you might want to have a second level with more information and more depth
and then if you must a third-level but you want to keep your websites as light as
possible in as much as you can on the first page so people can stick with them.
There's a few reasons for that and one of them is certainly around mobile
optimisation and again we're going to talk about that a little later in this
series but make sure your navigation is really intelligible. You need to have a
call to action on every page. This relates back to what I was saying
earlier about one of the reasons people are there. You don't sort of want them to
be wandering around a little aimlessly. Imagine they've just walked
into your bricks and mortar store you want to greet them straight away make
them feel really welcome and find out where you can help them with and where
you can direct them to. So the call to action on your first page should let
them know exactly what you want them to do and where they're going to be able to
do that. So make sure that that call-to-action is loud and proud
everywhere you can get it so people are never ambiguous about what they're doing
when they're on your site. One of the ways you can sort of find what that
experience is like is by actually getting some people you know to try it
out. You want to test your user experience with them if you think your
navigation is great that's awesome make sure that someone else who actually
is going to use it can find that too. Are you mobile responsive? Mobile
responsiveness is everything it's everything and you need to be able to be
sure that people walking around with their mobile devices are able to not
only find your site but to be able to use it. So if your site isn't responsive
and if you've got giant big pages that don't fit into the screen it's gonna be
a massive turnoff we know it's really so important for that right now and that
the majority of users of websites are now on mobile devices. In fact I'm pretty
sure you're probably watching this on your iPad or on your mobile phone right
now. So do unto yourself as you do unto
others and get your site responsive if it's not there and if you're building a
site it's absolutely mandatory that whatever you're using it's gonna be
mobile responsive but hey guess what we're talking about that later on in the
series. Are you localised to your customers? What does that mean? What that
means is that particularly if you transact with other countries and if
you're in Tasmania and you're a tourism operator you might be
doing a whole lot of business with China these days, your site needs to work in
those jurisdictions which means that quite often you're going to need to have
a second site located in those areas that's optimised for their search
engines wherever that is. So you need to make sure if customers are coming to you
from other places you're ready to accept their business and you're also making it
as easy as possible for them to get around. And the key thing of course for
so many web sites is can you easily transact even if you're a blogger these
days blogging is all about monetisation. So you want to make sure that when
people get to you, the cart is simple and smooth you've got PayPal or whatever
payment options you need hooked up. You don't want to have to send them off to
some sort of a bank transaction you want them to be able to transact then and
there. Think about the number of times you've been desperate to buy something
and then there's been that one step too far and you've abandoned the transaction.
There's an outrageously high amount of abandonment of carts on websites and
that's usually because they haven't made it easy to make people spend money so
you want to make sure that you can gently part your customers from their
cash as quickly as possible. They are some of the things that make your
website compelling. You might want to go and grab a cup of tea, have a quick
squeeze on your website and then come back and join me for part three. See you
soon.
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