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Blog from Derrick Pedranti and C2 Design Studio
Top Things To Include On Your Website
by Derrick Pedranti
on May 25
in Interactive / Website Design
Derrick Pedranti
Derrick Pedranti is Managing Director at C2 Design Studio – an interactive, digi
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- A good content management system. There are some great commercial ones but also excellent non-commercial, free of charge CMS's. Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and DotNetNuke are good options to consider. A good CMS will allow those who are not web designers/developers to update website content. And it will make the website more extensible since there are thousands of available extensions and plug-ins such as forms, slideshows, dropdowns, RSS feed integration, social web integration, etc.
- Fresh content. You should update your site regularly with some fresh content so that the website remains relevant and doesn't become stale. It can also give a user a reason to come back.
- A blog but you need to be sure you can maintain it. A blog needs to be fresh to keep your audience. You can use a blog for SEO by including relevant keywords and links and it's a source of fresh content as well. It can also help promote you or your company as an expert in the topics you blog about – it gives you the opportunity to share your expertise. Additionally, you can offer your blog as an RSS feed others can subscribe to.
- Content that is copywritten for the web. Content should be written with the web user in mind and not just copied and pasted from collateral. Doing it this way will improve your chances the user will read the content.
- Easy to follow intuitive layout and navigation. Users shouldn't have to hunt to find what they are looking for. Site search functionality should also help if there is a lot of website content.
- Visually appealing branded design. This will help users to feel confident in your company, product and service.
- Social media integration. If you have a Facebook page, YouTube Channel and/or Twitter page, there are ways you can integrate these into your website. It's a nice way to include a variety of fresh content and there are ways to integrate it so they don't need to leave your website.
- An organic SEO campaign to help drive traffic to your web pages. Also consider pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as a way to supplement this effort. People click the organic results more often but good organic results requires more effort to achieve. We recommend an organic SEO campaign for your most important keywords and then a PPC campaign to cover all possible keywords.
- Google Analytics (or another good analytics program). Google Analytics is free. It provides granular website statistical information that can help you gauge the success of your website efforts. This data can also help you make better decisions as to what kinds of adjustments and updates you need to make to the website to increase traffic and conversions.
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