OK. Now let's see the second and third factor ...

2. Content

The style is very important, but your perfectly aligned eye-catchy design will become completely useless if there is no … substance. After all, your content is the only reason why your visitors will return. If your content is helpful and relevant, they’ll come back. If your content is poor and irrelevant, you’ll be forgotten instantly …

Here are a few guidelines that can help you to increase visitor confidence in your company’s competence:

• well-organized easy-to-digest copy; don’t burden your visitors with large, visually overwhelming text blocks; break up your content into small paragraphs and transparent, seamlessly connected content blocks; be concise, be compelling and label your topics clearly to give readers a clear idea of what to expect; it’s a well-known fact, readers don’t read, they scan! so use headlines, sub-headings, lists, bullets, etc, and more importantly, whenever you can, cut the waffle; focus on simplicity, clarity and distinctiveness and a good information architecture
• reliable, valid data; ALWAYS double-check your facts and figures; ALWAYS use up to date information
• error-free copy; bad grammar, spelling mistakes, punctuation and capitalization errors, etc are unforgivable on a professional website; and guess what, you won’t be forgiven; believe it or not, spelling mistakes are costing businesses millions of dollars in lost sales every single year
• typography; choose your fonts carefully! even a black-on-white text can be illegible if you are using an inappropriate typeface; in general Sans Serif fonts – contemporary looking fonts without decorative elements, such as Arial or Verdana – are easier to read; also, you should stick to max 2 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes to keep your text content streamlined
• persuasive product and/or service pages; don’t forget your main goal! you want to persuade visitors to buy from you! do your best to create effective product/service pages with your ideal customer in your mind; focus on benefits, use their own language and strong call to actions
• engaging “About” page; yes, it’s about your business, but your visitors are focusing on one, and only one question: what’s in it for me? if you want to grab their attention write about their problems! more than that, tell them how you are going to solve them …
• regular updates; no one will read the very same blog post over and over again; old, static content will not bring visitors back! you’ll have to give them more and more new reasons to return
• personalized content; it’s a no-brainer: visitors get irritated and frustrated when they engaged with promotional content that doesn’t resonate with their interests; providing personalized content, a variety of content formats, differently tailored offers, etc will help you to meet their needs
  

3. Functionality and usability

If you want to learn how to create a business website that works, you need to understand that every single component of your website should work correctly … and quickly! Any broken, poorly designed or wrongly implemented component will make your visitors frustrated, disappointed and embittered. EVERYTHING should work as expected: links, menus, forms, buttons, interactions, etc. If visitors can’t use a feature, basically, the feature doesn’t exist …

But, having a 100% functional website isn’t enough! What you need, is a glitch-free website with a very high degree of usability. Even a well-functioning component can be extremely annoying or discouraging if is too complex or overwhelming. Your sign-up form might work perfectly, but if you are asking for too much information and the sign-up process is too long, you are going to lose the vast majority of your potential subscribers. Your goal is to remove all barriers that could squander their patience!

To put it simply: your site must be easy to read, navigate, use and understand. According to Hubspot, over 75% of users stated they rank ease of finding information at the top!

So, here are the most important usability elements:

• loading speed; if you don’t want to lose more than half of your potential visitors, your pages should load in less than 2 seconds; optimize your image sizes, minify you source code, and reduce the number of the HTTP requests
• prominent and simple navigation system; don’t make your visitors hunt for information! don’t make users think! every single web page should be obvious and self-explanatory; create a logical page hierarchy, use intuitive above-the-fold menus and limit your menu items to 6 or fewer; and keep in mind the three-click-rule: visitors should find any information they are looking for within (max) three clicks; if readers can’t easily and effortlessly make their way around your website, they won’t stay long
• long, descriptive hyperlinks; long, descriptive, well-emphasized text links will help visitors – and search engines! – to find their way around your website
• sitemap; a well-structured and visually-aided HTML sitemap will help your readers even more
• consistent layout; repeat the main visual elements throughout your website; don’t confuse your visitors and readers with different, inconsistently used layouts or consistently used visual elements placed in different places
  

And that's it my friends! Hopefully this tutorial will help you to create well-performing and efficient websites ... Godspeed!


If you have any comments, further questions or update requests please don't hesitate to react!