Launching your new website – A checklist
Are you about to launch a new website for your business?
Stop right there!
Before you do go ahead and hit the ‘publish’ button, you need to make sure you review the site and ensure that it is up to scratch. Otherwise, it may fall short of a few key aspects, and this could affect people’s opinions of the site and other more technical issues.
Not sure what you need to double check and review? Here is a handy checklist to guide you. Make sure you can check everything off the list before you go ahead and launch!
Links to social media
These days, social media is absolutely crucial to company websites. It really can make or break them. So, it’s important that you try and develop your social media presence and work on boosting all your followers. The more followers you have mean that your tweets and Facebook posts are a lot more likely to lead to conversions so you will get a lot more sales. One great way of getting more followers is to link to your social media profiles from your website. That way, visitors to your site will easily be able to navigate to all your social media profiles and follow you.
Business contact details
Remember when people used to flick through the Yellow Pages or White Pages trying to find a business for the services they required? Unfortunately, those days are very much over and nowadays people are much more likely to search online for business details. That means, you should expect lots of traffic to your website will be people trying to find out information about you. And that includes looking for your contact details. So, make sure that your phone number, email address, and postal address are clearly displayed on your site. You might also want to add a contact form to your website to make it simple for people to drop you a message. That way, you’ll find that most people who visit your site can get in touch with you.
Good copy
There is nothing worse than a website that is covered in spelling and grammar mistakes. No matter how many times you double check all the copy, there will still be the odd mistake and typo that gets through. So, it’s worth hiring a professional copywriter to take care of all the copy on your site. You will find that their expert eye and brilliant copywriting skills can really improve the overall quality of your site. It will certainly read a lot better than if you quickly wrote something in a rush! And it will almost certainly be mistake free!
Mobile responsive design
Something else you need to consider carefully is the website’s overall design and layout. These days, the majority of web users will be viewing your site on their smartphone or tablet device. As a result, laptop use is rapidly on the decline. That means that lots of people are viewing your website on small screens, so you need to make sure that your design is mobile responsive so that it can be correctly viewed. If it isn’t, it could appear distorted or not entirely visible when seen on such a small screen. Even though paying a designer to make your website mobile responsive can be a large investment, it really is worth it. If people can’t view your site properly, then they will quickly navigate away and won’t be able to make purchases.
Easy navigation
As well as being viewable on a mobile screen, you also need to make sure that your website is very easy for web users to navigate and find what they are looking for. It’s important that your navigation menus are clear and easy to scroll through. Ideally, you should also keep them to a minimum and not have more than two different navigational menus on the site. Otherwise, this could confuse people looking at your site, and they might find it difficult to find the information that they need.
Calls to action
Getting people onto your website is one thing. Getting them to do whatever you want them to do when they are on it is a completely different thing! So, for this reason, you need to add plenty of calls to action on the site. Wondering what on earth a call to action is? They are simply things that tell people to do something. They might include phrases and sentences like “visit our online shop now” or “click here for more details”. They are basically just prompts that everyone will see on your website. Hopefully, they will persuade people to do the things that you want them to do, like buy your products!
Strong SEO
Next, you need to make sure that people will find your website. Otherwise, there really isn’t much point in having one! Thankfully, there are plenty of ways you can do this. You just need to implement some good SEO! SEO stands for “search engine optimisation” and getting it right will help your site rise up through Google’s rankings whenever anyone does a search on the search engine. There are various ways you can improve your SEO, such as by adding plenty of SEO keywords into the copy and content on the website. Adding a blog to your site gives you the perfect opportunity to post articles that have lots of keywords in. Getting other websites to link to your content also helps, as does adding plenty of other external links to your own content. You will also find that adding your business’s location to Google Maps helps to increase SEO for local searches, which is really useful if you have a physical shop or office that your customers and clients can visit.
So, there you have it. The checklist for a website launch isn’t quite as long as you might have thought! Once you have double checked all of the points above, you’ll find that your website is good to go and you don’t have to worry about hitting launch!
