Your website is a business tool
There are no perfect websites.
To be sure, there are lots of extremely effective and compelling websites. Websites that provide a high return on investment and a dependable recurring revenue stream for their owners. That’s great! But even these sites are likely to have a diminishing marginal return.
Most businesses overhaul their website every three years. For most companies, it is a significant undertaking, that causes disruption in many areas. Though if you start by building a website that can evolve website over time, you will always be able to improve the website you have by testing to see what is most effective.
Measuring what works
The good news is that there are lots of things to do to test and measure what is working on your website. Even if you don’t have a dedicated DevOps team.
You can implement software plugins and code snippets that can see which pages are being found in search engines, which pages people visit, which pages they stay on, and for how long. We can also see the pages that no one either finds or are not interested in. We can see how far people scroll down a page, where their eyes gaze and what they click on.
We can measure what the public overall prefers and what causes them to click on a purchase button. We can track individual users, we can entice them with targeted offers and reminders.
The key is to keep working on your website, try new things and measure if they provide better results than the previous versions. Swap out images or text, maybe a certain turn of phrase is exactly what makes people ready to buy or to contact you.
This constant improvement process can also be tied to your overall brand strategy. A properly designed website should be able to morph to suit new marketing initiatives or advertising campaigns without having to be completely replaced.
This is made possible by building an initial website on a technical framework and design system that will allow you to measure, analyze, test, alter and re-test as many elements of the website as possible.
As soon as you launch your new website, it will become outdated and slowly decline. Website designers and programmers do a lot of guesswork when creating a new website. It is like trying to predict fashion trends, and our “latest thing” may not be as popular as we hoped.
Launching a website is not the end of the process but the beginning of the refinement and optimization stage. Designing a website with this in mind makes it possible to roll out more significant changes as your strategic positioning evolves.
As a web development team, we make small changes that we believe will improve the website. Then test the changes on real users to see if the page is more effective than the previous version. Then we do it again.
Some of the tools used on this website
This website is built using WordPress, the world’s most popular way to make a website — used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites. WordPress is excellent and can easily be enhanced with plugins to give it extra power.
