People search the internet for businesses, products, services, etc. The days of relying on phone books are long gone. If someone needs to find information, they are most likely turning to the internet to find it. When they search for something you offer or specifically for your business, you want to show up- and not just show up- but show up and look good.
Looking good is important because your website is often your first impression you give potential customers. If they found you through a search or through a link a friend gave them, your website will be your first point of contact with them. Before they even see your store or talk to your staff, they will see your website. You want that first impression to be a good one. Else all the hard work you've done making an awesome centre will be for naught.
What makes up a quality website?
A quality website is clean, well-organized, easy to navigate, clear/concise, modern (in terms of style and layout), functional, branded, and motivates the visitor to do business with you. Information such as hours of operation, location, and contact info should be extremely easy to find. If you have social media profiles, buttons linked to these profiles should be present.
People want a quick solution to their problem or a quick answer to their question. Make it easy for them. They also want to look at something that is visually appealing. You need to make sure your website looks good in all browsers, and screens of all sizes. You should browser test your website to make sure it looks right and functions properly across all browsers.
A quality website also looks good and is easy to use on a mobile device. The current trend of increasing mobile use to access the internet means your website needs to be properly built and designed for optimal mobile viewing. Currently our own websites are viewed about 65% on mobile! So optimizing your site for this is critical.
Speed, google now puts a considerable emphasis on the speed, and load demands that your website puts on the client. Having poorly sized images, or lazy code in the back of your website can have a massive negative impact on your experience! In turn, google will also decrease your website ranking within there search, meaning you get less reach on their search engine. Check how your current website performs here : Google Page Insights
Example of a good and bad google insight score for Desktop, any number above 65 is good, above 90 is excellent, but very hard to achieve with a styled website. Note google will give two scores, one for desktop, and one for mobile as it judges your site on different factors.
Then in contrast, if we take the same two sites, and compare them on mobile, you will see that both sites perform worse than their desktop counterparts. Due to multiple factors being penalized more severely, partially; touch capability of website, font sizes for screen size and total load size
A quality website is also well-polished. This means it has no spelling or grammatical errors, no lame clip art, no 1995 web design traits, no blurry images, no loose ends or 404 pages. Your content is complete and visually appealing. Fonts match across the entire website and font colour and size choices have been properly made, and ideally scale to screen size (yes, this means no lime green size 18 font on a white backdrop with a flashing clip art graphic underneath it).
Video content and 360 walkthroughs of your centre are fantastic ways to highlight your centre. With all of your imagery, make sure guests are happy, having fun and interacting with your centre to highlight it in it's best light! By centring the image, and making sure the focus is where you want guests to look!
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Yes!
Your website is a tool. Make that tool quality from the start. Then use it and take good care of it.
Zone offers webservices, if you want us to build and optimize your site we can do so!
We've got templates to build out an optimized, converting website in a short time for you. From that point, we can either transfer it to you for you to control into the future, or we can keep helping you to update it and keep it preforming as it should.
Reach out, and we can show you some examples!