Making a good first impression online

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Ensuring that your website makes a good first impression is absolutely essential. If it doesn’t, viewers are likely to navigate away from it pretty quickly. This doesn’t just cause you to lose potential customers in the short-term, it also damages your SEO efforts, therefore reducing your ability to recruit viewers in the future. If web users navigate away from a website too quickly, search engines will penalise that website.

Obviously, you can help your website make a good first impression by ensuring that it is aesthetically pleasing and sensibly laid-out. However, your website’s speed and functionality also contribute to the way web users perceive it, so you should also take other, more technical steps to make your website appealing.

1. Choosing a fast, reliable web-hosting service

Web-users don’t have the time to wait for slow websites to load. Regardless of how well-designed and well-developed your site is, the web-hosting service you use can drastically affect how quickly it actually loads and how smoothly it performs. That’s why it’s important to choose a top-notch website hosting service like the one we offer here at Excalibur Digital.

2. Maximising functionality

It’s important for modern websites to do more than just convey information. For example, your website needs to offer viewers the ability to contact you and most business websites can benefit from ecommerce services. If your website offers a specialised service, it may also require equally specialised widgets. We can help you maximise your website’s functionality and develop specific pieces of software if necessary.

3. Streamlining structure and navigation

Complex website structures and navigation systems can overwhelm viewers and increase your site’s bounce rate. It’s therefore very important that you streamline your site’s structure and navigation. We suggest utilising a horizontal navigation bar that appears at the top of each web page and links to each major section of your website. The main page of each section should then contain links that lead deeper into that section. This avoids cramming links to every page of your site into one area. We can also help you improve your site’s structure.

Here at Excalibur Digital, we’re committed to ensuring that your website is fast, functional, easy-to-use and customer friendly. Contact us today for more information.