What Makes a Great Website?

Your website is more than code and numbers, but is the most important tool for your business. What makes a great website?

There are so many single things that can define a great website. It is a platform that demands sufficient strategy upfront. It is the landing pad for your entire business, therefore, it needs to cover every single component that makes your business inherently you, but it also needs content, consistency, and customer-facing components that will guarantee your consumers have a great customer service experience. What are the things that make a great website? Here are a few qualities and tools that you should consider going forward.

It Should Be Easy to Use

Look at it from the perspective of your customer. They are always in a rush and they need to find what they are looking for instantly. The UX (user experience) plays a critical role in helping the customer navigate your website, but it also ensures that they stay with you.

When you create a website, you've got to consider a logical sense of navigation, which will spill over into the layout, visual cues, and when customers need additional support. A great website doesn't just help people find what they're looking for instantly, it also helps those who are just browsing. This is why you may want to think about adding tools to supplement the journey, like a live online chat.

When you are looking for how to add online chat to your website, it should never be overbearing, it must take the role of a helpful sales assistant that is there if you need them, slinking away in the background or in the corner.

It Should Showcase Your Brand Persona

Everything will communicate a very specific message, which is why it is important that every aspect of your site is on-brand. This doesn't just encapsulate your website content, but also how you communicate with customers. Your website is, very likely, going to be the first time your customer interacts with the business, so you must make an amazing first impression and communicate your business through your website design.

You should consider some of the following aspects of developing a brand persona:

• The tone of voice, for example, if you are informal, friendly or technical.
• The colours and fonts you will use in your logo, which should filter through into the rest of your website design.
• The overall content, for example, if you are focused more on images rather than written content.

There are many aspects of a website that can easily be overlooked by small businesses, which is why you need to do the legwork upfront. You need to make sure all of the subtle components work together to create an amazing user experience.

It Should Integrate With Other Tools and Platforms

Your website should be a stand-alone entity, but you must also consider the omnichannel experience. Your website is the first port of call for your service or products, but you also need to understand how your website will interact with other online brands and tools. For example, you will need the website to integrate with your social media marketing platforms, as well as your email marketing tools.

It is critical for the sake of customer service that you know which tools you want to integrate with your website. If you are wondering how to add online chat to your website without it compromising the visual language, the great thing about the Click4Assistance online chat tool is that it is customisable, so it can seamlessly integrate with your website, which doesn't distract the customer, so you are effectively keeping them engaged in the customer journey.

Speed

A great website should load quickly for two critical reasons:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is a critical tool that can impact your website rankings on SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). The Google algorithm considers the speed of your website in its rankings. If your website is slower, you will be penalised for it.
• User experience. 1 and 4 users abandon websites that take longer than 4 seconds to load. With every second your bounce rate, the number of visitors leaving without taking any action, increases.

The latter point is partly to do with how your website loads on a mobile device. Your website needs to be easy to navigate on smartphones. When you are looking for how to add online chat to your website, you must consider how it will fare on mobile. It's beneficial to come up with your website design for mobile before your desktop, as more people are going to be browsing your website through their phones rather than sitting at a computer screen.

Quality Content

This goes back to the tone of voice and the visual language you use for your website. Like it or loathe it, SEO is critical to your appearing as a dominant website in your industry. Some of the simple things can make a big difference to your content:

• Avoiding jargon.
• Explaining why your service is good.
• Adding regular content that is relevant to your products and services.

Your website can get repeat custom through regular social media updates and supplementary content like blogs or video blogs. It is vital to helping your SEO strategy, and while it may require some investment, it is critical to the overall success of your website, and, therefore, your business.

It Is Secure

We live in a world of data breaches that occur on a regular basis, regardless of the size of the company. One of the best practices to make sure your website is secure is to have an SSL certificate. This is a digital certificate that can authenticate your identity and enable an encrypted connection, which can help upgrade your website from HTTP to HTTPS, which is infinitely more secure. If you are wondering how to add online chat to your website, and if online chat is going to benefit your business, you've got to think about it from the customer's perspective. They need peace of mind that your website is going to be secure enough to facilitate their needs.

A great website covers a wide variety of disciplines. In the world of customer service, it is pivotal to ensure that the user experience is catered for. A great website covers some of these components, but there are so many more.