Every relationship needs love and care to survive and flourish. While this rings true for personal relationships, it also applies to your relationship with your website.
Sadly, we see many clients neglect or abandon their website after a redesign, waiting until their next redesign or “vow renewal” to make changes. This February give your website some attention with one of these acts of love below:
1. A Great First Date
Home Page Design Upgrade
For most websites, your home page is the most important page and it’s typically the first page web visitors will land on.
The top area of the home page design is your first, and sometimes only, chance to engage a web visitor. Think of the design as your first impression on a date. You want to be dressed to a T, charming, and show off your best characteristics.
If the home page design on your site is looking outdated, consider a new image or even video design in the top area of the page to spruce things up. With a web designer’s help, a video can capture your branding and value proposition.
2. Write a Love Letter
Update Your Web Content
We talk a lot about design tweaks and fixes but updating your website content is just as important.
If you’ve been neglecting the copy on your site, engage your visitors with new, well-written content. We recommend focusing on your most important pages first, such as your home page, service pages and about/team page.
Content can be a struggle for a lot of site owners, so consider hiring a content writer to help you. Just as you might quote Shakespeare, Burt Bacharach or the Beatles in a love letter, professional writers are valuable resources to help you write the best copy possible for your site.
3. Remember Important Anniversaries
Customize Your About Page
After your home page, the about/team page is one of the most visited pages on a website.
Forgetting about this page on your site is like forgetting your anniversary or your partner’s birthday. This page is a big deal to web visitors and the content & design of this page will impact how a visitor views your company.
We often recommend designing a custom page layout for this page since it receives a lot of traffic. There are numerous ways to customize your About page. Consider adding new photos of your team with links to bios. You could include a custom timeline or history of your business or showcase your team’s values in a custom graphic.
4. Perform an Act of Kindness
Navigation & Footer Clean Up
Cleaning up the navigation and footer of your website can be thought of as an act of kindness, like taking care of that forgotten or annoying chore that you and your partner both avoid.
There are lots of ways to express love in this area. One idea is to do a redesign of just the navigation and footer area. We’ve seen this type of update transform a website, especially if the older design had a poor mobile experience.
You can also clean up your navigation by evaluating the pages in your top navigation and the information in your footer. Long drop-down menus with lots of pages are cumbersome to navigate. Try to reduce the number of pages in your navigation.
If you need to have a lot of pages in your navigation, consider switching to a mega menu. This will allow a cleaner look to the whole site.
5. Trust is the Best Proof of Love
Data Privacy Best Practices
Trust is critical in any relationship and we all want someone to confide in. On a website, web visitors look for what’s called “trust symbols” to determine if the site and your business are trustworthy.
In the past year, GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation) best practices have become an important trust symbol on sites. Although the GDPR went into effect in the EU, it set new standards for data collection and privacy worldwide. Web visitors now look for a cookie notification and other GDPR best practices on a site, as a sign that they can trust your business with their information.
If your website is missing these elements, the good news is that WordPress has a lot of the GDPR features available in the WP core and with additional WordPress plugins.
