What Makes a Good Website

Suppose you ask me about my favorite part of the Signature Experience and the rebranding process we send clients through. In that case, my answer will always be the website. It’s the first part in the process where the client really has a light bulb moment and sees everything come together that we have worked for up until that point. It’s where the brand strategy meets the brand design, your work, portfolio, and copywriting. Everything comes full circle in the website design.

Your website is the most powerful marketing tool. It should be working for you 24/7. Your website should be your best salesperson, driving leads to your business regardless of your price point or market.

What Makes a Good Website

Another reason my favorite part of the Signature Experience is the website design because it drives sales and conversions after our clients’ launch. It’s what propels their business forward if they continue to market.

The Website Audit: Evaluating Your Site for Maximum Impact

Your website is your most important marketing tool. It should be your best salesperson, working 24/7 to drive leads to your business regardless of your price point or market. But what makes a good website & how do you know you’re ready for a new one?

I invested in a wedding market survey done by ThinkSplendid. It comprised roughly 27,000 couples in the luxury market who spent between $96,000 and $500,000 on their wedding. The couples were asked in this survey how they found the wedding vendors they hired. Now, 74% of them said internet search. That beat out even social media at just 64%.

That tells you right there, no matter what price point or market you’re in, that this applies to luxury wedding pros just as much as digital marketing agencies But what makes a good website, and how do you know if you are ready for a new one? Well, I will answer both of those questions in today’s post, but first, I want to invite you to get this free guide we have to help you pinpoint.

Grab that free guide and discover if a rebrand is in your future.

8 Qualities of a Good Website

At CLD, we give out-of-the-box designs that enhance user experience, not confuse them or make them have difficulty navigating (easier said than done). Here are elements of a good website:

1. User-friendly navigation

You want visitors to easily navigate the website and quickly find the information they seek. Having user-friendly navigation is also important to search engines because they consider that when ranking your website. However, you want to ensure the user has a good experience before focusing on search engine optimization.

One way to do that is by correctly naming your pages in the navigation. There is a time and place to be ‘cute,’ and your website menu isn’t the time for that. Label your about page ‘About,’ your services page ‘Services‘ or ‘Experience,’ ‘Blog‘ for blog posts, and your contact page ‘Contact.’ This helps website visitors quickly know where to navigate.

2. Attractive and modern design

A successful website functions properly and looks visually appealing to your ideal client. You can have the most impressive services in the world, but if the design doesn’t catch their eye, the visitor isn’t staying long enough for that to matter.

There is a balance between having a fresh, modern design and ensuring it’s easy to navigate. You don’t want your website to be so unique that visitors can’t decipher how to move around your website. Another key factor is the hierarchy and number of fonts you use on your website. Try to keep between 3-4 font styles on your websites and use font hierarchy to help your visitor understand what’s important information.

3. Responsive and mobile-friendly layout

92.3% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you lose potential clients daily because of bad website design.

Mobile-friendliness is also a factor in search engine rankings. Google announced in September 2020 that they were moving to mobile-first indexing for all websites. This is one of the main reasons we design in Showit as our preferred website builder. It allows us to design the mobile and desktop separately from each other, and we can ensure each experience is optimized based on the visitors’ platform they’re using to view the website.

4. Fast loading speed

The two-to-three-second mark is the turning point where bounce rates skyrocket – in fact, 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site, according to Website Builder Expert. How fast your website loads is important to search engines and affects how your page ranks.

Optimizing the image sizes is one of the best ways to trim your page load time. Before we design our clients’ websites, we use an image optimizer to compress photo file sizes without compromising the quality of the photos.

5. High-quality and relevant content

Your website needs to have good, relevant information. Your website cannot have images only and no copy. That won’t help you rank or convert website visitors.

The first thing you want to do is write all the copy before designing your website. This allows your brain to focus on the content and not worry about design. Don’t try to write your copy while inside your website builder. You also can’t stuff a bunch of keywords into your website design. It needs to be valuable content.

6. Clear and concise messaging

Within 3 seconds of someone landing on your home page, they should be able to tell what you do, who you do it for, and where you’re located (if you service a specific area).

Your entire website should have clear and concise messaging. One of the ways we do that for ourselves and our clients is by focusing on a signature service. Our entire website focuses on that single service as our bread and butter. For us, it’s our Signature Experience. We have several offerings, but our brand and website design package drives most of our revenue.

7. Contact Infomation

The website shouldn’t be the visitors’ final destination with your business. You want them to take the next step. Make sure you include a contact form, email, and phone number if you have one.

A great idea for business websites is to add your email address to the footer of your website. That allows it to show up on every page of your website, so no matter where a user finds themselves on your website, they always have quick access to your email address.

8. Search Engine Optimization

You can have the best website in the world, but if no one can find it, then it doesn’t matter. You have to focus on an SEO Strategy, so people will organically find your website.

Having a good website design is only half the battle. After you have a good website, it’s time to focus on search engines finding your website. A great way to get found for more keywords is to create new blog posts continually. This allows you to expand your probability of getting found in more relevant keyword searches.

Follow these best practices, and you’ll have a great website that converts visitors into potential clients.

How do you know if you’re ready for a new website?

I was on a panel with Renee Dalo, and she mentioned this – imagine 100 potential clients coming to your website. Does the thought of 100 potential clients visiting your website excite or scare you?

We have put a ton of work into our website, which drives conversions. So the thought of 100 potential clients coming to our website excites me. Sign me up!

Your website should be converting anywhere from 2-5%. A conversion means someone comes to your website and takes a specific action. If you had 100 people visiting your website, you should have two to five people taking action. For most, that means they should book a consultation or fill out an inquiry form.

A good website doesn’t mean that it’s functional. A good website is when it’s converting. For example, we use Google Analytics, and inside Google Analytics, I track conversions. In the last week, we’ve had 122 people view our signature experience page, and I received 4 applications for people to work with. That’s a conversion rate of 3.2%. So that falls within that, that 2-5% range.

You can look at your Google Analytics and see how many people have looked at our experience page or services page and how many have filled out a contact form. Or you can set up a goal inside Google Analytics, and you can see what your conversion rate is. And get a good conversion rate by looking at those two things.

Traffic Issue

I recently reached out to a client who launched their website about three months ago, and whenever I checked in with them, they said they weren’t getting very many inquiries.

This shocked me because I don’t have favorites, but this website would be on that list if I did. Carrylove Design’s clients, success is our success. And so, I offered to look into their website and their analytics for free because I wanted to know what was going on and diagnose the issue.

And so, I looked at their Google Analytics and saw they had only gotten about 15 views to their website. For reference, I compared three of our clients I know who regularly get bookings; they get between 120 to 150 page views every seven days. 15 versus 150 is a huge difference. So what that tells me is that it’s going to be a traffic issue.

Getting inquiries from your website is really just a numbers game. If you only get 15 views to your website, it will affect your number of leads. It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if you’re not getting traffic to the website, that will cause an issue with you getting leads.

One Main Goal

You should have one main goal on your website to track conversions, and really your website can have multiple different actions that you want people to take.

You could have people signing up for a newsletter list, joining a Facebook community, or filling out a contact form. We track multiple different goals on CLD’s website. But the main goal I would want them to fill out an application for the Signature Experience. And so our website has been optimized to take people from Point A of landing on our website to Point B of filling out that application. There are other options, as I said, getting free downloads, guides, and booking Strategy Sessions, but those aren’t the main goal. 

Tips to get people to take action

What is your one main goal? Do you want people to fill out an inquiry form? That’s going to be the majority of people. Here are some things you can do on your website to help get visitors to act. 

1. Limit the number of menu options on your top menu. Your top menu is how your website visitors orient themselves and get familiar with your website whenever they first land on it.
   
   Whenever you first go to a website, one of the things that you do is look at the top navigation to get a feel for where you’re at and, if you’re looking for specific information, where to find it. It must go in a sub-menu if it is not part of your moneymaking offer.
   
2. Leave breadcrumbs at the bottom of every page where you want them to go next. I call this the Hansel and Gretel Method. You want to direct visitors where to go next.
   
   Imagine you’re giving a house tour. You show them around your house. You take them room by room and provide them with a lay of the land. You’re going to be the one leading the way. You don’t let the visitor wander around your house trying to find their way into different rooms. You’re going to give them a tour. And so, your website is your virtual home. You’re going to lead your guests and show them where you want them to go. And the best way you can do that is by leaving those breadcrumbs.

A gut indicator that it’s time to rebrand

An excellent gut indicator of if you’re ready for a rebrand or a new website is if you feel jealous whenever you see somebody else, like competitors, peers, or even friends, launch a new brand and website. You feel jealous – a golden sign that it’s time to rebrand.

One of our competitors, somebody we’ve lost some business to, relaunched their website a few weeks ago. I didn’t feel jealous at all. I looked at it, but it just didn’t phase me because I’m really proud of how our site looks. And our website is working to bring in really amazing, ideal clients that we love to work with.

So I can go, look at other competitors’ websites, and admire them for looking good, but I don’t feel jealous. I don’t have that gut reaction, which is another good indicator.

If you would like to reach out and talk to me more about it, you can fill out an application, and we’d love to hear more from you.