During this time while we’re at home with our families due to the Covid 19 pandemic. I thought it would be good to share a few website enhancement tips. Most of these enhancements can be done on your own, but, if you’re not comfortable making these updates, you may want to consult with a web designer. However, if you choose to proceed, these enhancements will give your site a clean and professional look and may also boost your SEO ranking on Google and Bing. The enhancements that I will discuss in this blog post are; using a colour theme, use of fonts, use of a clear visible logo and favicon, adding a blog to your site, making your website responsive, adding pictures and SEO.
Use A Colour Theme For Your Website
Using a colour theme for your website keeps your brand clean and consistent. The colour theme of your website usually falls in line with the colours of your logo, but could also include other additional brand colours that are not in your logo. These are usually about 5 or less colours that you have chosen to represent your brand. Once you have figured out your colour scheme, you can then figure out how colours will be used on your site. When figuring out the colour and design pattern for your site, you want to keep a consistent look and feel across pages. If a header is blue on one page, you don’t want to break the pattern and make it purple on the next page. When users come to your site they use visual cues to determine where to go next, if you break the colour pattern on the various pages they will be confused as to how to navigate your site.
Use Three Or Less Legible Fonts
if your website builder or website theme allows it, you should only use about three fonts maximum on your website. These fonts should be the fonts that you have chosen as part of your brand guide. Similar to the use of colour, fonts help to guide users through your site and keep a consistent look and feel. If you use too many fonts or use fonts that are not legible, the visitors to your site won’t be able to read through your site with ease. They will be confused as to where to go first or what to read first if the fonts are illegible and jumbled.
In my previous blog post here, I discussed the need of having a professional logo. This is consistent with having a visible logo and making sure it’s prominent on your site. If your logo is prominent on your site, visitors won’t have any confusion as to whose website they are on. They will know right off the bat that it’s your website based on the branding by your logo and brand colours. You will also need to use a favicon on your site as well. A Favicon is an image of your logo or graphic that represents your company that is added to your site and loaded in the browser’s tab. Based on my research, the favicon does not have any SEO value but it does help with your brand awareness. For more information on favicon, you can visit here.
If you are like me, blogging is probably not your favourite thing to do. In fact, it is one of the most difficult things for me to do. However, I know the value of blogging, which is why I force myself to blog. Blogging helps not only your site but your overall business in general. Adding a blog to your site helps with SEO, It validates you as an expert in your field, it gives visitors to your site a more compelling reason to do business with you and the list goes on and on. If you don’t have a blog on your site, you should really consider getting one added, the value proposition is too high not to have one.
This really should be a standard thing in 2020, but I still am seeing sites out there that are not responsive. All the web builders i.e. Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress are building responsive sites as default, so there is no reason that you do not have a responsive site. If you don’t know what a responsive site is, it is when your site is designed to reconfigure itself to work on any screen i.e. desktop, mobile phone, tablet and watch. This is a must have feature because if you have a mobile phone and you load a site that is not responsive, it is usually very difficult to navigate. When browsing sites that are not responsive; you have to move the site around to read it or you need to pinch to zoom in the screen to click a link. This can frustrate visitors to your site and they won’t want to browse through your site. It also helps with SEO as well because Google’s search bots also scan your site to see if it is responsive, if it’s not Google will not index your site to be returned as a search result on mobile devices.
Adding photographs/images to your site helps to give that visual component of your brand. It also helps to break up content on your site and gives visual interest to pages. The images used on your site should represent your brand and be used throughout the site. The image style that you use on your website should also extend to social media with the same colour scheme and tone. However, you do have a bit more freedom on social media because social media platforms are not viewed in isolation. When sharing on social media you should keep the look and feel consistent to your brand as possible. A social media trend that is happening right now for designers and creatives is to create flatlay images, you can go to @ginaayanna to take a look at flat lay inspirations. The images that you use should be either purchased or you can pull them from a site that gives you access to free images. One of my favourite sites for images is Unsplash, where they give you access to using free high resolution images
This is a tricky one because it is not necessarily a straightforward update to make, it is more of a science to making your site search engine optimized. However, there are updates that you can make to get started and then work with a professional later on. Some of the basic updates that you can make on your own; would be to make sure your website has content on it for all the pages that you would like ranked, you should have at least 500 words on the page. The pages should have the correct structure in terms of heading and sub heading and content. Images should have alternate text, which means they should have descriptions added to the image/s. And finally, you should have metadata added to all your pages. The basics for metadata is that you should have a title and description for every page, this gives search engines meaningful information about your page. I am not going to go too deep into this because it can get really technical and that is not the goal for this blog post.
I hope that I have given you some additional insight into how you can enhance your website. I know some of this information may be on the technical side for some, however, if you can get some assistance or learn as you go it will definitely be worth it.
