June 28, 2019

This paid piece is sponsored by Click Rain.

Your company’s website is often the place where potential customers make their first impression of your brand. Will visitors receive the same positive impression on your site that they get walking through your front door or meeting you in-person in the community? If your website is not living up to the rest of your business, it’s time for a checkup.

So what factors create a good website, and in turn, a good first impression? Click Rain marketing technology experts will break it down for you.

Performance

Ever been on a site that takes forever to load? Frustrating is an understatement. Research shows that 53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load — not a great first impression. When speeds are slow and content isn’t loading, you risk losing credibility and sales. To provide the best user experience possible, give your site speed a checkup to ensure fast pages and happy customers.

Accessibility

Think about a brick-and-mortar business. Things like elevators and parking for those with disabilities make it accessible to all customers. Your website is no different. Ensure that visitors of all abilities can easily use your site by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Development, content and design all play an important part in your site’s accessibility, ensuring a positive impression for all visitors.

Fresh content

Content is what brings people to your website and what keeps them coming back. If your content is outdated, visitors might lose trust in your business before you even have a chance to make your sales pitch. Fresh, updated content is easiest to publish and manage when you have a modern, easy-to-use content management system, or CMS.

Click Rain’s CMS of choice is Craft, a PHP-based solution that gives you full control over all your website content. Anyone from designers and writers to administrators can learn to use Craft. The more confident you are in your CMS, the more likely you are to keep your content up-to-date and welcoming for your visitors.

Technology integrations

Can your website give customers a complete brand experience? By integrating email marketing, sales and e-commerce functionality or career listings on your website, you can provide visitors a consistent experience and a full-featured first impression.

But the possibilities don’t stop there. Can your website personalize the content for each visitor, based on the person’s geography, customer status or past history on your site? With the right CMS and the right technology, you can give customers the online first impression to match the welcome they receive walking into your business in-person.

Show up in search

To even have a chance to make a first impression, you need to show up for the terms your customers are searching. Google regularly scans the pages on your site, recording the site structure and on-page content. It’s important to regularly review your search rankings and determine if it’s time for a search engine optimization, or SEO, tune-up.

A complete SEO audit and refresh can be daunting. Focus first on the most impactful and actionable items. We recommend starting by ensuring your site works well on mobile devices and checking for duplicate content or broken links. By taking the above steps for performance, accessibility and fresh content, you’ll also be helping search engines at the same time as helping users.

Get started

Our team of experts specializes in building websites of all sizes, from simple to complex. We’ve been doing it for more than a decade and make the web development process simple, straightforward and stress-free. Contact us to see how we can help.