A Website is the online identity of a company or organization. The task associated with the Website is to represent the company, sell the company’s name, attract more visitors, generate more business leads, promote more sales of the company’s products & services and ultimately, help to increase revenue.
Many businesses mistakenly see a Website as a necessary cost of doing business, rather than a valuable investment. Choosing the right web development company is the key to turning that investment into a profitable one. Below are some of the areas where many sites on the web today fail, and as a result are less successful than they could be.
Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 1/20th of a second, according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site's "visual appeal".
Through the "halo effect", first impressions can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility, usability, and ultimately influence our purchasing decisions. Creating a visually appealing site needs to be a well thought out process. Color schemes, graphics, and fonts need to be selected with the target audience in mind.
Here we place key design notes regarding the visual layout and formatting of your website.
Capturing your audience involves targeted and deliberate use of colors, images, font styles and more.
Google has incorporated the speed of a web page into its search engine rankings. Google announced this new signal in their official Webmaster Central blog:
"Speeding up websites is important - not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."
Here we measure and analyze the page load times across your website.
A lot of times it's the little things that count when building an efficient site. Optimization of images, javascript and html are some of the things you can do to shave some time off the loading of your site.
It is important to compare your load times with competing sites, as a benchmark test is only relevant when placed against sites of similar type/category.
Over 72% of users click on natural SEO-powered results at Google. Search Engine Optimization gives you top search engine placement to tap into a new source of qualified visitors who are actively searching for products and services like yours on the Internet.
Unfortunately, only 7% of all websites are visible by the search engines according to a recent StatMarket.com study. Most Websites are not properly optimized for maximum search engine visibility. Even worse, most companies don't have an overall marketing plan to raise their site's search engine visibility.
One of the most important yet overlooked areas, here we dive into the internal structure of your website and evaluate it from a Search Engine's perspective.
Proper use of tags, good keyword frequency, relevant content, and clean navigation are just some of the things we look for here.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. If you’re concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), validating your source code is a necessity.
One reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders “crawl” the web, indexing web pages and their content. They are basically toned-down web browsers that aren't concerned with displaying content for a user, but are concerned with recognizing and interpreting that content.
Markup errors sometimes may not affect the display of your content in web browsers. They can, however, disrupt the vastly important process of spiders parsing your page for all relevant content and can potentially make some of that content unrecognizable to search engines.
Sample Markup Notes
Here we run your website through an HTML code validator and inspect the output.
Validated HTML & CSS markup not only helps your site to stand out to the search engines, but it makes sites that are much easier to modify or update in the future.
It is imperative that a web design company puts first priority to your site's look, usability and accessibility for a more credible and successful website.
Builders constructing a house sometimes use under-performing materials and techniques in order to decrease the time and cost associated with a project. Similarly, many web design companies often employ hasty coding practices and haphazard layout structure in an effort to minimize the resources needed to complete a website.
Finding a web development company that has the expertise and resources to give your business focused, undivided attention is the first step toward online success. The end result should be a "hands-free" sales, lead or interest generation system for your company.
