If your website is starting to show its age or isn’t quite up to the standard of where you think it should be, it might be time to improve it. One major issue with this is that it can be quite tough to know what to change. You know that you want to improve your website, but where do you start?

Your first thought might be that the best way forward is to have an entirely new website built from scratch. While this may be the best solution for some, there are many small changes that could be made to improve your website that are both quick and easy compared to a complete overhaul – saving you a lot of time and money.

Here is a list of 13 tips that our Wigan web design team has compiled to help you improve your website.

Shorten your menus

A menu with a large amount of links under them can make it more difficult for users to find what they’re looking for. This can be frustrating to users resulting in a higher risk of losing potential clients. If you have over ten links under one heading, consider moving some of them elsewhere to help the ease of use on your website.

Create ‘Call to Actions’ on all pages

Adding a call to action on every page can help you to guide a user to the information that you want them to see, whether it’s to direct them to your portfolio, contact page or encourage them to buy a product or service. In the form of stylish buttons or images, this has the added benefit of improving the look of your website and the ease of navigation to pages the user wants to find.

Add contact details on your home page

This may seem obvious, but there are many websites out there that have hard to find contact information hidden on a sub-page somewhere. There are many users that could be navigating to your website with the sole intention of contacting you; therefore you should make this information as prominent and easily findable as possible – displaying your phone number and email address in the banner or footer for example.

Display your opening hours

Along with contact details, the times at which you’re available to be contacted or your business opening hours are just as important as this is simple information that is commonly wanted by potential customers so make it easy for them to find.

Create an ‘about us’ page

Having an about us page on your website is very important. If potential clients are going to use your services, then they’ll want to know a bit about who is behind the branding and company name. You shouldn’t add just information about your qualifications (although it is important!) but also add some personal details. For example add photos of your employees with small paragraphs about what they do in their spare time. This shows the faces behind the company and can start to build a client’s to trust you and your business.

Integrate a map or ‘find us’ feature

Another piece of information that users may want to find is where you or your business’s stores are located. It is possible to implement a widget that upon imputing an address can provide directions directly to you. This shows that you care about making information as easy as possible for your users to find.

Make your website easy to navigate on mobile devices

The amount of mobile and tablet devices has been rapidly increasing over the past few years. With such small screen resolutions it can be frustrating for mobile users to navigate a website designed for a much larger desktop resolution. There are existing tools available to build mobile friendly versions of your website. Alternatively you could hire a designer to help create a fully functional mobile site.

Remove unnecessary features

If you’ve ever been on a website that blasts music out at maximum volume while you try to find a mute button, you’ll understand how annoying this can be. Remove any unnecessary splash pages or music, and ensure that any embedded videos do not automatically play as this can be distracting and annoying to users – likely resulting in them leaving your website.

Add social media buttons

With the rise of social media it’s a good idea to add social features onto your website, helping your customers connect with you and your businesses and recommending you to their friends. Consider adding ‘share’ and ‘like’ buttons on your website to promote the sharing of your content, and possibly add Twitter or Facebook feeds into your website to communicate more effectively.

Create additional and relevant content

Adding relevant and up to date resources to your website can keep people coming back to find out more information about the industry that you work in. This can include how-to guides, reports and surveys or even a blog to let people know what your business is up to. Increasing the relevancy of your website is a great way to have your website perceived as high quality with more people spending larger amounts of time on your site.

Display testimonials

Your existing customers can be quite influential by providing reviews of how using your business benefited them. Providing testimonials on your website can go a long way towards convincing prospective clients to trust you.

Decide the purpose of your website

Think about the overall purpose of your website and why it exists. Once you know exactly what you want your website to do you can start to restructure it to maximise the potential of the website as it works to accomplish that target.

Talk to us!

If you’re struggling with getting the most out of your website, it may be worth considering external help to bring in new ideas and experiences. At Nexus Websites, our friendly and knowledgeable Wigan web design team are always on hand to give advice and offer solutions to meet your needs.

Brief: We have designed and implemented a new website for an accountancy firm, giving them a very professional online presence.

SEO Results:

wigan accountant - Top
bookkeeping wigan - Page 1

That contact is a potential new client! All down to you! Thanks (Nexus Websites)! looks really good. I just need to spend some time polishing up the content. Thanks (Nexus Websites). Excellent job!”

Jim Carmichael-Prince, Managing Director

www.nwaccountant.com

Email marketing is a type of marketing that involves advertising your products or services directly to a large audience of potential customers or existing clients. Email marketing is done by creating and sending out marketing material by email to a collection of email addresses – or mailing lists.

Email marketing, when used correctly, can be a very effective way for any company to help engage and communicate with existing customers, promoting customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business. It also allows you to send emails whenever you introduce new products or services that can attract new customers to buy from you with quick results.

There are a wide range of email marketing services and applications across the internet. With so many different types available to choose from, it can be overwhelming to know which product is the most suitable for you to use. Nexus Websites have tested several various free email marketing services that, and the best one that our Wigan web design team have found is called MailChimp.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a fully comprehensive email marketing service and as such it includes features that allow you to design marketing emails an email newsletters, share them across various social media outlets and statistics tracking.

With MailChimp you can create a signup form that is fully customisable towards your company’s branding with features such as images, radio buttons, dropdown boxes and more. It can also integrated on Facebook with support for both iPads and laptops.

In MailChimp you can split the users that have signed up into various categories such as by location or social statistics that can help you target your marketing material more specifically to certain groups of people. There is additionally a powerful tracking and reporting tools showing you statistics and trends of your subscribers.

Another powerful feature of MailChimp is with the email creation tool. There is a vast range of pre-designed templates that you can use for your marketing campaigns with compatibility for multiple languages. It is possible to customise templates in a very easy to use drag and drop editor to craft your email to look exactly how you want. More advanced users with a good knowledge of HTML can even create their own templates from scratch.

What helps to make MailChimp in our opinion the best free email marketing services available is the large amount of resources and support available. There is a section of the website containing guides in PDF format that are well presented and easy to understand helping the most novice of users get the most out of using the tools provided.

The vast majority of MailChimp’s services are available for free (there are a couple of exceptions) with a limit of 2000 subscribers. If you need more there are monthly as well as pay as you go packages available. Check it out here.

Brief: Creating an entirely new design for the client’s website, updating from their old site to a much more responsive and visually appealing layout.

SEO Results:

urban fencing - Top
mesh fencing uk - Page 1

(awaiting feedback).”

Andrew Fairhurst, Managing Director

www.urbanfencing.co.uk

Google have recently released the latest update to their anti-spam algorithm ‘Penguin’. With this release, the Penguin technology has been modified into Penguin 2.0 to enhance its spam filtering abilities.

The leader of the web spam team at Google, Matt Cutts, discussed the 2.0 update in the 199^th episode of ‘This Week in Google”. He also pointed out the relevancy of a recent YouTube video discussing the subject that can be found here.

Search engine optimisers and Webmasters may see drastic modifications to Google’s search results, with a huge 2.3% of queries in English will be majorly changed by the new Penguin algorithm.

More information has also been posted by Matt Cutts on his blog about the Penguin update, explaining that it has now been completed for all languages, and that different languages with higher amounts of spam will see a greater effect by from the update.

Previous Penguin Releases

What is Penguin 2.0 though? Here is a list of all previous penguin releases, although the first three will still the same algorithm with a few minor modifications, but with the new 4^th revision, it introduces large changes to that algorithm hence the name Penguin 2.0.

• Penguin 4 – 22nd May 2013 (effecting 2.3% of search results)
• Penguin 3 – 5th October 2012 (effecting 0.3% of search results)
• Penguin 2 – 26th May 2012 (effecting 0.1% of search results)
• Penguin 1 – 24th April 2012 (effecting 3.1% of search results)

Brief: Designing a small and simple website with a modern look, effectively promoting the services offered by the client.

SEO Results:

maintenance chorley - Page 1
building services chorley - Page 1

Really impressed with my website from start to finished alex has kept me informed about any decisions made and offered good advice when needed thanks alex great job.”

Kenny Kay, Owner

www.maintenancechorley.co.uk