Surviving in the current online market requires more than visually attractive web design. Maximising the potential of smart website design strategies along with marketing and SEO is now extremely important. Website optimisation (also known as SEO) helps in all ways and paves the way for the success of a website.
Maximising Website Design Potential
Web development should be aimed at making websites search engine friendly. This captures the attention of search engine spiders and improves your site’s ranking. In addition, the website should capture visitors’ attention instantly. Apart from the visual aspect, functional aspects such as reducing load time by incorporating CSS image sprites, halting the use of Flash programming, using compressed content and using small images instead of scaling down large pictures can prove very effective.
For example; CSS and JavaScript can be placed in external files to reduce the amount of repeated code and you can also minimize 301 redirects and HTTP requests. Placement of JavaScript is another interesting and important aspect of website optimisation. When these scripts are incorporated within the body of the page, they affect parallel downloads. So, whenever and wherever possible, they should be placed at the bottom of the code to ensure that most of the content is on the viewer’s screen before slowdown occurs. In the case of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), images load better if they are hosted on different servers. If your website is hosted on a CDN, make sure that the server network is the advanced version.
When all these aspects are incorporated into web design, user-friendliness increases. However, using website templates make this optimisation more difficult to implement, as the bulk of the code has already been written. Making changes is therefore harder so customised implementation of technical knowledge is critical.
Website Optimisation in the Present Scenario
The most important factor of website optimisation is to increase “conversions” as opposed to “bounces”. Among hundreds of people who visit your website every day, a lot of them “bounce” off of your web page and look elsewhere. Bouncing gets you traffic, but does not get you conversions and cannot sustain your success in the long run. So, if you can find ways in which your conversion rates are higher than your bounce rates, you have a clear winner in your hands.
In order to enjoy all these benefits, you need an end to end web development team who can build your website from scratch, make it appealing to visitors, infuse features which attract search engines and finally, increase visibility by employing sophisticated website optimisation (on-page SEO) and marketing techniques. Contact Tann Westlake to find out about how we can build your site from the ground up to maximise your businesses potential.