Building and maintaining a consistently updated, high-quality website requires a lot of hard work and determination, especially if you’re working on it alone. It can be hard to grow an audience and it can leave you feeling disheartened when your work just doesn’t seem to be getting the recognition you feel that it deserves. Generally speaking, this is the point where most people tend to give up and neglect their website development, when in reality this is where you should be pushing forward to gain and engage viewers in a proactive way… 

Without constantly updating your website with a stream of interesting content and information for your readers and target audiences, they’ll eventually get bored of returning to your website. This is due to the fact that they’ll only discover that there is no new content to digest and stop visiting it all together. In turn, this will ruin your chance of success, reduce your site’s domain authority and worsen your bounce rate. 

Not only that, if you don’t maintain a high standard of web design and development, potential customers and visitors are more likely to visit one of your competitors instead of you. If you create a professional website with aesthetically pleasing designs and eye-catching features, your website has a better chance of ranking well and succeeding at keeping viewers engaged. 

Instead of letting all of your previous hard work go to waste, why not follow our guide below on how to keep your website development looking and feeling fresh? Our guide contains a series of professional hints and tips to allow you to climb to the top of the success ladder and really get the most out of your website. 

Stop Neglecting Your Website Development…

We have compiled a list of the top do’s and don’ts of website development and maintenance to help you to succeed. Covering everything from SEO to design trends and more, we ensure that you’re not missing a single trick to get your website soaring and avoid neglecting your website development. 

Neglecting Your Website Development? This Is Ruining Your Success

Are You Neglecting The SEO Side Of Website Development?

SEO is incredibly important, not just for content creation and marketing but also for website development. 

Content, Content, And More Content…

This may be an obvious one, but we just have to mention it anyway. The more content you publish, the better. Of course, it’s pointless simply publishing irrelevant content just for the sake of publishing something, it should be planned out well. If not, you’ll still be ruining your success by not appealing to your viewers in the correct way. 

Decide on relevant content for your target audience and carefully plan it so that you have a mix of different topics going live on particular days. The more of a schedule you can create, the easier it will be to maintain growth and keep people interested. 

By building a blog planner, you can easily view which dates certain content should be going live and keep track of what you have already published. Organisation is key when it comes to content planning and creating, so don’t neglect this and watch your website development slowly but surely creep its way up the rankings on search engines. 

On-Site SEO Work…

Without ongoing on-site SEO optimisation, your website will never be easily found from an organic search result. By taking the necessary steps to ensure that your website is fully optimised, you’re helping to reach as many customers as possible. SEO can make or break your business success, so definitely don’t abandon it thinking it’s not the end of the world. 

It’s important to have an effective system in place which accurately measures the SEO value of the content you’re publishing to ensure that you’re targeting the right keywords in the correct way. Yoast SEO can be a great website optimisation tool to allow you to see if you’ve optimised to the best of your ability. 

Off-Site SEO Work…

SEO work isn’t all based on what you can achieve on your own website, there is so much more to it. Social media marketing, guest blogging, brand mentions, and influencer marketing all comes under the umbrella of off-site SEO work. It’s essentially the work that you put in outside of your website to improve your rankings and visibility. 

Working towards receiving brand mentions and links from other trustworthy sites will help your website to appear more trustworthy to both potential customers and search engines alike. 

A Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Website…

92.8% of internet users navigate from a mobile device which is a huge percentage. This is why now it’s more important than ever to fully optimise your website for mobiles and tablets. Not only that, Google announced in 2016 that they would be using mobile-first indexing, which is essentially the notion that pages are now crawled with mobile in mind first. This means that if your website isn’t well optimised for mobile, you’re unlikely to rank well in search results. 

A great way to look at it is to think about your own experiences when visiting websites. When you’re on your phone and click onto a website that doesn’t sit well on your screen, or the functionalities simply just don’t work, how likely are you to try and persevere with the website as opposed to just visiting a different one? The majority of people will just give up and try elsewhere for the information they need, therefore ruining your chances of success. 

It’s definitely worth optimising your website for mobile devices to avoid losing out on a huge amount of visitors and potential customers. 

Neglecting Your Website Development? This Is Ruining Your Success

User Experience And Design Development…

How your website looks and responds when being used is so important we can’t emphasise it enough. From designs to user experience, they’re both things that need to be carefully considered to ensure that your website development is successful. 

Daring Designs…

Bold, eye-catching designs are the way forward to stand out on the internet. Without making your website memorable, you’re giving your potential customers no reason to remember you – never mind return back to your site. 

When it comes to designs, you should take inspiration from the top modern web design trends, incorporating them into your own unique website. Spend time researching what designs your competitors are working with, aiming to better understand what works and what doesn’t for your target audience. From there, you can ensure that your website development has been planned and designed correctly to create an expert website and excellent user experience, which brings us to our next point…

User Experience Is Paramount…

You could have the nicest website in the world to look at, but if it isn’t easy to navigate for users, it’s a huge waste of time and energy. Focusing on user experience should be something you have in the forefront of your mind at all times whilst developing your website. 

Simple menus, clear buttons, easy search functions, and navigation should be your main priorities. This makes your website’s user experience positive and encourages them to come back in the future. Think of it like this, if you visit a website that appears complicated to use, would you stick around to work out how to use it? You’re most likely to click off it and find a more user-friendly website instead. 

When it comes to the internet, people are naturally impatient and want instant results for everything. Therefore, you should appeal to this way of thinking by building a website that provides information with ease. Ensure that your page has the fastest loading times that you can achieve and you should start to bring in customers and clients. 

Testing And Debugging…

Back-end developers are responsible for all of the background development rather than the visuals and front-end creation. Part of the role includes testing and debugging any web pages which have issues occurring on them. Websites can get extremely complicated when they’re full of glitches and bugs, leaving them looking ‘spammy’. Therefore, it’s extremely important to not neglect your website development from the get-go and ensure that everything is working as it should be. 

It’s also worth noting that websites can gain bugs at any moment, so you should always be prepared to step in and solve problems as and when they occur. 

Neglecting Your Website Development? This Is Ruining Your Success

Goal-Orientated Website Development…

Taking a moment to pause and consider exactly what you’re trying to achieve from your website will help you to create something so much more effective. Thinking about your business development and growth, do you want more sales, to rank for local keywords, or launch a new product or service? Whatever you’re trying to achieve, you need a website that has been designed with the intention of specifically achieving that goal. 

Goals change and shift to match the energy of your business. An interactive website that can be altered as and when your business needs change is ideal. However, it’s also important to consider if your website is a direct driving force contributing to your goals or just a general element of your online presence and marketing. 

Call To Action Buttons…

It’s all well and good to have a great website full of fresh content, bright visuals, and responsive designs. However, you need to be able to convert your customers to the next step of the customer journey. The best way to do this is to create call to action (CTA) buttons. These CTAs should fit well into your website design, yet stand out enough from the crowd to draw attention for customers to click on them. 

The buttons themselves should be the first thing that your eyes are drawn to on the page, clearly marked so that potential customers know exactly what they are being guided to and clicking on. 

The Ability To Book A Discovery Call/Consultation…

Focusing on the products or services that you offer, you should make it clear and concise to potential customers exactly what you can do for them. An easy online booking system is a great thing to have in place, allowing potential clients to organise a call or consultation to begin their customer journey. 

Email List Growth…

Your email list should be continually growing, ensuring that you can reach more customers each time that you send some fresh content out for consumption. If you’re struggling to grow it, you can incentivise your customers by offering something in exchange for signing up as opposed to simply stating ‘sign up to our newsletter…’. 

Make sure that there are plenty of opportunities to sign up on your website too so that you aren’t missing out. Without being incentivised, you’re missing a trick and should consider adding a lead magnet to your website. 

Neglecting Your Website Development? This Is Ruining Your Success

Website Development Projects To Increase Revenue…

Your website should be seen as the hub of all your digital marketing efforts and a core component for making a profit. This means more than just helping people to find you, it also means generating direct sales straight from your site. You don’t have to be product-based to do this and there are a few ways to generate revenue as long as you have properly developed your website…

Adding A Passive Income Stream…

Creating digital products such as an eBook, eCourse, or bundles of downloadable assets is great for business development as it adds passive income to your revenue streams. Anything of value that you can provide to your customers and website visitors, you should offer to bring in extra income. Of course, your website needs to be able to support the sale and delivery of such items. If you have an existing website, now is the time to upgrade it to offer more and if you’re starting from scratch, it’s certainly something worth bearing in mind. 

Creating A Membership Site…

Do you have specialist knowledge that others in your industry could benefit from? Or additional support that you can offer to customers/clients that will add value to what you’re already doing for them? Launching a membership site is a great way to increase the lifetime value of your customers by encouraging them to pay a small subscription fee each month in exchange for access to exclusive content, features, support etc. 

Developing a membership area for your website is easy. Once you’ve scoped out what your competitors are offering, you can see what your business can bring to the table that is completely unique and decide on a subscription price. Do you want different types of memberships offered in tiers? The possibilities are endless and the world is your oyster, so create something you’re proud of and watch the memberships flood in. 

Affiliate Marketing…

If you have a well-developed, well optimised website it will attract a lot of traffic, and traffic means revenue. This revenue is not only generated in sales for your own business but also – if you’re clever – in affiliate marketing too if you link your high traffic content to affiliate programs in related fields. 

For example, who in your industry offers an affiliate scheme or referral program that would earn you money for every person that bought from them? Consider gurus in your area of expertise, coaching programs you could recommend, and more. The more relatable their content to your business, the better. Their consumers should be interested in similar topics to your target audience to get the most out of your affiliate connections. 

Find Your Website Development Success…

If you need a wizard to be able to take over your website development, look no further. Our team here at Acrylic Digital are here to help you. Simply contact us below for a free consultation. 

Author Profile

Simon Nadin
Co-founder and director at Acrylic Digital, Simon is a technical wizard and man of many hats. If he’s not busy building websites, coding, or creating apps Simon is very hands-on in all our projects and business development.
Get to know him...

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    Author Profile

    Simon Nadin
    Co-founder and director at Acrylic Digital, Simon is a technical wizard and man of many hats. If he’s not busy building websites, coding, or creating apps Simon is very hands-on in all our projects and business development.
    Get to know him...