What Does it Take to Have a Successful Website?

Our approach is that you should always view your website as a living, breathing marketing tool. It’s never done. The website is the wheel, but there are many spokes that make it work.

These spokes include design, SEO, copy, development, and more, all of which play a role in your website, impacting the bottom line. In other words, websites need multiple parts to be successful.

For our team at RED66, we find that it’s easily expressed in a Venn Diagram. We believe that your website is the hub of your business. It should have a good customer experience, inviting design, great content (easy to read, consume and understand), strong SEO elements, and well-done programming.

All of these components are imperative to building a successful website that generates leads, supports sales, and drives strong engagement.

Website Design and Customer Experience: UX Design

Websites should be easy to navigate and click through. That’s no secret. You certainly don’t want to invest lots of hard work to get someone to visit your site and leave just as quickly because there’s too much going on or nowhere to go.

Websites should be intuitive, clean, and clear, and navigation should be simple and thorough, making it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

Contact information should be clear, and it shouldn’t take more than a couple of scrolls to understand exactly what it is that your business does. At RED66, we take design and customer experience seriously, creating professional, functional, user-friendly websites.

Steve Jobs said it best: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Which Item is Most Important for a Successful Website Design?

Words on the page matter, and that’s how people tend to refer to website content – the words. However, website content includes images, videos, infographics, chatbots, and more. Each visitor has a different favorite type of content they like to consume, and it’s a good idea to incorporate them all.

Balancing all of your content with great SEO, where search engines index based on words on the page, makes for an all-encompassing website.

Tip: If you have just a video on a web page, we recommend adding a sort of transcript or what the video is about for SEO purposes. This helps your site in terms of crawlable content from the search engines.

Back to content. If your site is focused on generating leads and sales, then your content does a lot of the work for you.

• It has to be trustworthy.
• It has to be relevant to your visitors.
• Also, it has to be mobile-friendly.
• And these days, even a little bit entertaining.

We approach content creation, whether initial pages or blog articles, as some of the most impactful tactics to expand your digital footprint. Content can be repurposed to email messages, social media posts, handouts, and can be used more than once.

Web articles or blogs are an excellent opportunity to answer prospective clients’ questions before they ever reach out to you. More than 70% of searchers identify who they’re going to select to help them with a service before they even reach out to the company!

Make sure your content addresses pre-purchase and consideration questions, and what it’s like to do business with your organization.  We could talk about content all day, but you can review more of our own blogs for information on useful and good content.

Making Sure Your Website is Optimized for Search, or SEO

With years of experience, our team has a solid understanding of SEO best practices. From foundational elements with site structure and on-page SEO elements to content writing and proper development processes, we make sure client websites are ready to support lead generation and sales.

We also work with SEO partners who are dedicated specialists, enhancing and improving our search engine optimization efforts and client results.

SEO or search engine optimization isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a process, and the best way to improve your website and overall visibility in the land of search takes more than a good foundation.

RED66 is dedicated to pushing your company to the top for relevant search terms. We’re able to do that with extensive SEO improvements and enhancements to website structure, content, technical SEO, and mark up.

This isn’t exhaustive because being successful in search engine marketing includes a lot of on page and website pieces, but there are many off-page tactics as well. We’ll save that for another article.

Website Programming & Development Impact on Online Success

Even the most beautifully designed websites will lack effectiveness if not programmed properly. Why?

Well, developers have different thought processes and skill-sets than designers. Programming can impact animations, transitions, site load times, and the ability for content to be crawled. This is in addition to user experience in following navigation, clear paths, and more.

Ongoing improvements in user experience, technical SEO aspects, and adding content or other elements to your website are influenced by the programming and development of the website.

Our Approach to Web Design & Development

It may sound exhausting, and it takes a lot of work to try to bring all of these things together. But we understand that.

Over the years, we’ve developed a detailed website planning, design, and development process that will take such a big project off your own plate. We pull all of these different people and skill-sets together for every website we create.

• Our designers design.
• Our SEO team optimizes structure, content, and planning.
• Our developer develops.
• Our writers write.
• Our account managers keep it all on track.

Want to learn more about our approach or how we may be able to help you create a more effective website? Just reach out; we’d love to hear from you.