Seven Ways to Whip Your Website into Shape

When’s the endure time you apprehend your own website? No, actively – the endure time you looked at every page, clicked every hotlink and apprehend every chat on it.

If it’s been a while, it’s apparently time to brace both your site’s agreeable and its look. Here is a seven-step affairs for giving your website a activity – some tips are abode of David Rusenko, CEO and co-founder of the site-building belvedere Weebly, while some are my own:

1. Simplify. Do you accept three sidebars awash with altered widgets? Get aback to basics. Attending at anniversary page of your website and ask yourself what one activity you’d like visitors to yield — assurance up on your email list? Pick up the buzz and alarm you? Whatever it is, accomplish that the alone activity to yield on that page. Too abounding choices could cause abashing and accomplish affairs leave.
2. Fix the problems. As websites get updated, things tend to get hinky in the design. One page uses a altered blush or font. Another has altered margins or a altered template. Links get broken. The next affair you know, the accomplished website looks anarchic or sloppy. Yield the time to analysis anniversary page, bland out the bumps and accomplish abiding advice is authentic and links are working.
3. Get a makeover. If your website hasn’t gotten a new attending in several years, it’s apparently starting to attending dated, Rusenko notes. Customers become apathetic and feel annihilation new is accident at your company. Consider a redesign that reflects your company’s accepted administration and attitude.
4. Add account and stories. Want some chargeless media coverage? Start putting out columnist releases and announcement them on your site. When reporters visit, they’ll browse those and get the faculty that your business has a lot traveling on. Anniversary of those releases ability atom media absorption on their own, too. For added credit, column a specific media acquaintance name, so reporters apperceive just who to call.

5. Brace the About page. Your About page is usually the second-most visited page of any site, which agency it’s an important page that needs to put a affable ‘face’ on the company. Rewrite it to cover beginning aggregation account — awards won, new articles introduced, offices opened or new aggregation associates who’ve joined.
6. Blog – or don’t. If your business website has a blog that hasn’t been adapted in three months or more, it’s time for a austere talk. Blogs can drive new affairs to your site, but a dusty, anachronous blog doesn’t forward a acceptable message. Accomplish a accommodation to either bang that blog aback into accessory – announcement at atomic already a anniversary – or get rid of it.
7. Don’t be mysterious. You wouldn’t accept how abounding business websites I’ve scanned area the buzz number, address, acquaintance names, artefact prices and hours of operation are either harder to acquisition or missing altogether. Analysis your website to see if your basic advice can be calmly found. Get those contacts in bigger fonts, up higher, and arresting on every page of your site, not hidden beneath a ‘contact’ tab.