In this episode, we are talking about who are your website users and how they access your site? If you’re designing a new website, it’s really important to consider and understand this before you start.
If you’ve had a website before, it would be a good idea to load Google Analytics (GA). GA is a free tool that can really help you to understand information such as where your users are located, what devices they’re using, what the most/least popular pages are and roughly how long people stay on the website for. It can also help you to understand what the entry page is, how long they’re staying on each page, which links they have used and even the point at which they leave your site.
There are housekeeping tasks that you can undertake to ensure that your website is efficient and easy to access; such as checking that there are no broken links or missing pages, that your hosting speed and service is sufficient and that your page loading speeds are not excessive. It’s also important to consider accessibility; whilst it’s not a legal requirement, having clear, accessible, easy to read content will not only assist the user experience, it can also help to improve your search rankings. If you are a business with premises which customers are likely to visit, it would be worthwhile having a map and your opening hours on your contact page.
Asking friends and colleagues to review your website can provide useful insights in terms of how easy it is (or not!) to find a particular piece of information or a product. Using these insights can then help you to determine how accessible and easy to use it is when you are considering building a new site or redesigning an existing one.
Next we’re talking about browsers – these days it’s a given that your website needs to be responsive on mobile devices, but considering which browsers your visitors might be using to access your website is key; 65% of people use Chrome, followed by 17% using Safari and just 4% on Firefox. And with Google taking 92% of the market on search (rivalled only by Bing with a tiny 3%), it really is imperative that your website looks good on Chrome and can be found by Google.
We’ve got lots more topics in this season of the podcast, that take you through, step by step, some of the key things we think you should consider when taking your website to the next level.
