Success! I’ve drawn you here with my attractive stock photo and a headline that promises to deliver. But is that enough? (No). Read on to find out what makes a successful website.

It’s quick

People are fickle and their attention spans aren’t great. (Was that a squirrel?) Your website can be as pretty as a picture (it definitely was a squirrel!) but if it loads with all the verve of a decommissioned freight train, you’re going to lose your audience.

A few simple changes can make all the difference when it comes to website speed:

• Compress all your images. Image compression sites are everywhere – and they’re usually free of charge. Compressed images use up fewer bytes of storage without compromising quality.
• Think long and hard about whether or not you need videos. They may look great but they always bring the trade-off of increased loading times.
• Disable unused plugins. Should your website be built using an accessible CMS (like WordPress), ensure that each of the plugins you’ve installed is actively being used. Otherwise, crucial time is being wasted in loading features that aren’t being showcased

It’s not been written by Condescending Callum

Condescending Callum is a dangerous member of society. He holds on to an archaic belief that website content needs to be unflinchingly corporate in nature – that viewers need to understand, at every juncture, just how successful every decision the company has ever taken has proven to be. And he’s oddly obsessed with synergy.

Yes – your website should be informative. It should tell people what you do, and why you’re good at what you do. It should sell without hawking. Its content should neither suffocate nor condescend its readers. Engage with your users – don’t preach down to them. Provide the tools with which users can make their own judgement as to the quality of your services, instead of telling them what to think. Because they won’t listen.

It’s not boring

Not every topic is conducive to lively debate and juicy thought pieces. Cement, for instance, isn’t a particularly exciting topic. Nor is rubble. Yet there is no excuse to bore your readers. Develop a tone, tell a story, showcase the people who make up your business and give a bit of insight into what they do in their spare time. Even people who work with rubble have hobbies.

Put yourself in the shoes of your reader. What would you want to read? What images would you want to see? To return to the earlier point of man’s fickle character, imagine that your site has just a few seconds to engross its readers (it shouldn’t be too much of a leap of faith – over half of your website users will bounce back off it in less than a minute). What would you want to see or read about?

 

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