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Considerations When Building a Website

Things to consider when making your next website. Internet users amount to more than 3 billion in 2015, that’s more than a third of the global population! In 1991 there was only one website online and then it grew exponentially reaching a billion in 2014. Only around two thirds of…

Things to consider when making your next website.

Internet users amount to more than 3 billion in 2015, that’s more than a third of the global population! In 1991 there was only one website online and then it grew exponentially reaching a billion in 2014. Only around two thirds of the current websites are active though. Since the first website has been launched demand has grown strong and new jobs have emerged. Web developers have quickly turned into a high in-demand job throughout the years that didn’t exist a decade ago.

“More than 1/3 of the world’s population use the Internet.”

Today with DIY platforms it’s easy to build a websites but in terms of functionality and design they usually don’t stack up, now you have to be on the cutting edge to distinguish yourself from your competition online. Internet users expectations have increased and if they don’t instantly find what they are looking for they’ll just switch from your website to another without a second thought. There’s no shortage of competitors online!

Optimized navigation, relevant content and reactivity are the key for a good website. According to a survey 47% of people expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% would leave if it takes more than 3 seconds. It means almost the half of users would not even see your website if it’s taking too long to load! On top of that, statistics show that users form their opinion about a website in 0.05 seconds. That’s not long to make a good first impression of your business.

As the web has evolved, so has what you need to take into consideration in building a new website and what the must-haves are for running it effectively.

 

Mobile Responsive

After first Smartphones were launched the number of mobile internet users has grown very quickly too making crucial for developers to add new skills to their resume. Responsive design turned into an inescapable option to improve websites even though there are still too many of them that are devoid of it unfortunately. The giant Google even modified recently its algorithms to account for mobile-friendliness in search engines results. The reason is simple: in 2015 almost 800 million of internet users are mobile-only users!

 

Google Analytics Integration

Integrating your website with Google Analytics is essential as part of every web build. Google Analytics allows you to monitor traffic on your website and get a precious overview of very important informations such as:

  • Source of the traffic
  • Traffic composition
  • Behaviour before and after visiting your website
  • Time spent on each pages
  • Bounce rate (meaning how many persons quit your website right away compare to the total of visits)
  • Conversion rate (depending on where you put the conversion code it can be a purchase, a registration or filing out a form)

 

Conversion Optimization

Once you’re connected to Google Analytics, you want to be utilizing this wealth of data to ensure your site is doing it’s job. Basically, the goal is have your bounce rate as low as possible and the conversion rate as high as possible. Beauty is in the details, and the data! To know what works best for converting your audience test, test test!

Some factors you can test:

  • Colors
  • Buttons Shape
  • Call-to-Action
  • Font
  • Characters Size
  • Form Length
  • Copy


Why is all the above so important? Well except the obvious goal of sales, your website needs to capture your audience’s attention and if you’re not up to snuff it’s going to be more difficult to find you online giving your competitors the edge. Google Analytics gives you the insight to  know how you’re doing, and if you’re not stacking up then most of search engines will consider your website as not relevant and you won’t appear at the top of search results. Since we know that most of the people never click on the second page results, being relegated beyond this is equivalent to being invisible.

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