If you are keen to promote your website, it is only too easy to find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by different marketing opportunities and techniques. One consultant might enthusiastically recommend producing a video for YouTube with the hope that it will “go viral”. Another adviser might suggest an aggressive internet advertising campaign, including investing in Google AdWords. A further agency could suggest expending a lot effort in building an engaging social networking presence.
Web design and web development should come first
While none of these methods are necessarily lacking in validity, it can sometimes be a lot more productive to see what can be done closer to home. Indeed, rather than focusing heavily on external techniques, grafted on to the site after the event, it can be more useful to take a closer look at web design and web development. These core features of a website site can, in fact, help a website to market itself. Or, at the very least, they can form the powerful basis of a successful marketing campaign.
How to make your site stand out
There are a number of ways in which web design can be optimised to make a website stand out from the crowd, and some of them go well beyond the narrow remit of “graphics”; although of course the graphical look and feel plays a crucial part. A powerful website design should indeed begin with the site domain name. A catchy domain name, such as “Flickr”, “Amazon” or “Facebook” will stand the site in good stead in to the future, in particular regarding search engine optimisation (SEO).
A successful domain name is often quirky and abstract; hinting intriguingly at what the site has got to offer. In the case of Amazon, there is a suggestion of unending vistas, breadth of ambition, and unlimited possibilities – all hinting at the vast range of stock that Amazon, the world’s largest internet retailer, does indeed hold. A catchy name will both encourage word-of-mouth recommendations, and make searching for the site easier.
Making your site easy to find, read and navigate
Another feature of website design that will help with website promotion is well-thought-out site navigation. Users don’t want to have spend ages hunting around a site for whatever they need. A concise, attractive, clear and logical navigation will go a long way to winning over users and encouraging repeat visits.
An attractive use of graphics and colour scheme can also help a site to make a strong first impression. But these features can be even more effective if they are neatly integrated in to the site layout and architecture. A site can make a real impression of integrity and authority by taking a unified, consistent approach to web design.
Choosing your keywords and deciding where to put them
Website design can also make a strong, basic contribute to SEO, which should be the key plank of any web marketing campaign. Giving attention to page titles, making sure you include relevant search-engine-specific keywords, can really boost a website’s position in search engine rankings.
Finally, clear concise, relevant writing is integral to web design, and can also help to promote a website in the long term.
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