WordPress Tips

You have a great new idea for a business, and you will need a website for that new venture. Web design is both technology and art. You will need an experienced WordPress website developer to create a site that propels your business forward. NOYO Web Development has put together a list of features that your site must have to succeed. We will take a look at that list over the next several posts.

One of the first things you need is a good, easy to remember URL. Make sure it makes sense for your business and doesn’t rely on weird spellings and is available across other social platforms.

Now that you have your domain, you will need to find a developer and work together to build out the site. Here are the first things to consider?

1. An Organized, Commonsense Roadmap

Of course you want your business website to be aesthetically stunning, but it’s for more important to consider functionality and usefulness at this point. Develop a map on how you want the site to work. This is critical for user experience and SEO. Google will consider both the content and structure of your WordPress website for rankings. WordPress developers call this wireframing. Map out and create a mock up of your website. You may want to have some friends look at it for feedback. You want a site that is intuitive and makes sense to the average user.

2. Fundamental Business Information

Rather than creating a WordPress website that you want, try to design the website your clients want.
Keep text to a minimum in areas such as a mission statement and other information that is nice to know, but not critical to driving revenue. You cannot underestimate the power of brevity. One or two well written sentences can make a difference in your conversion rates. A good content writer can help you with this.
Depending on your business, there are other things on a website that are information. This includes menus for restaurants, product images for retailers, and testimonials for businesses that rely heavily on customer service and referrals. A good example would be a wedding planner who needs recent brides to gush about the great service in order to acquire new clients, or a hairstylist who wants client testimonials to drive in new business. Tailor your site to provide the information your clients will be seeking.

3. Contact Information

This sounds so basic, but some business owners forget to include their contact information or make it difficult to find. We encounter many sites that make it hard to contact the company. Have a number, email, address and a contact form easily accessible and visible. It makes a difference because there’s nothing more frustrating than being unable to get in touch with a needed business or service.

Plus, if you make it hard for an unhappy customer to contact you for resolution, you risk bad Yelp or Google reviews. That can permanently damage your reputation.

When you put an email address or a phone number on the site, don’t upload this information as part of an image — the number or address should be able to be clicked on or copied right from the site in order to place the call or send an email conveniently and quickly. Most smartphones these days have the ability to do “click to call” on the web, so make the process as easy as possible for users.

If you prefer to interact with customers by email rather than phone, be sure to acquire a professional looking email address. Get an email address for your domain. Using a free service such as Google, Yahoo, or worse AOL, can look unprofessional.

We will continue our top 10 essential features for a business website in our next post. Be sure to subscribe to learn more and be prepared when you hire your WordPress web developer.