Top Tips for Websites

Your website is often the first time someone will encounter your organisation. It represents and defines your offering to a wide audience. So what are the simple steps that will improve its reach, usability and effectiveness?

Be clear and set goals

It is really important to be clear about what you want your site to achieve. Have a clear idea of your website’s objectives and who the site is aimed at (your target audiences). This will help focus the design and content so it meets their needs. This also ensures any content created will continue to attract the right kind of visitors.

What are some good examples of website objectives? Objectives can be things like increasing ticket bookings, growing your newsletter subscribers, increasing donations or raising your brand profile. They will involve all the things you want your website to help your organisation promote or achieve.

Create a list of website goals so you can measure your success and link them to a digital strategy.

What are some good examples of website goals? If one of the main objectives for your website is to sell more tickets, then a website goal would be more specific, for example: sell 200 tickets in April. You then have a goal to aim for. When you monitor the performance of this goal in your analytics and ticket sales, you can make decisions on how to work towards reaching the goal. For example: you might see that there have been no social media posts, or newsletter promotions around ticket sales, so you can try these things to help boost ticket sales.

You can refer to these goals to make sure they continue to relate to your wider objectives, whether it’s creating posts for social media or making content for your newsletter.

The design of your website

Alongside content that is written for your target audience, the design of the site should equally resonate with your audience and communicate your messaging. A good supplier with work with you to define this, through conversations, moodboards or ‘design concepts’. Larger organisations will have brand guidelines that need to be adhered to. If you are designing the site yourself, try to envisage what your audience would be attracted to rather than your own personal design preferences.

Mobile and device friendly responsive design

Ensuring your site works on mobile devices with a wide variety of screen sizes is a must. This includes making sure that you have large tap targets and that text is readable on small screens.

What are tap targets? Tap targets are links and buttons on your website that you would click with your finger. If they are not big enough they can be difficult to click on.

Mobile phone usage is on the rise and now accounts for over 60% of all internet traffic. Neglecting to make your site mobile and device friendly can exclude a significant portion of your potential audience.

Intuitive navigation

Finding relevant content should be as easy as possible for visitors. Key things to consider include the language used, the structure and order of menus, and the journey your visitors take through the website to get them where they need to be.

Refer to your website goals, and think about the types of people who are visiting the site and how they will find the information they need: plan each journey from start to finish.

Great copy and calls to action

The content on your website should be compelling and easy to read. Ideally, it should fall into one of these three categories:

• Do – Does the page encourage your visitor to perform a particular action? This can include signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a ticket, or watching a video.
• Feel – Does the content spark an emotion, or entertain? At its best, this kind of content is very shareable and can gain you more visitors.
• Inform – Does the content tell people about your location and how to get there? Does it include accessibility details about your venue? Make sure you have enough information on your site, so people feel comfortable about taking action.

Finally, make sure the content flows and visitors are never left on a dead-end page. Use strong calls to action (‘Book Now’, ‘Get in Touch’, ‘Sign Up’), and further reading links to entice users to spend more time on your site.

Security, privacy and GDPR

All sites should have at the very least a basic SSL certificate. This shows you are taking steps to protect any information sent through your website forms and can help prove due diligence in your GDPR policies. Most hosting providers will install basic-level security certificates for free. You can find out more about SSL Certificates here.

Cookie compliance is also an important consideration. Speak to us if you are not sure what your responsibilities are, or use a tool like Cookieserve to ensure you are legally compliant.

Ownership and control of your domain name and hosting

It is important to make sure you maintain awareness of all the login details for your website. You will need these to make sure the domain name is paid for, or if you need to change hosting providers or redesign your website.

Many businesses have gotten caught out with this problem. They trusted a friend or a developer who built the site for them, then over the years they lost touch, and simply couldn’t get access to their vital website information.

There are many domain name registrars which you can purchase and manage your domain name through. Make sure you know where yours is kept and how to access it.

It’s often worthwhile to have more than one person who holds the knowledge of where this information is saved, as your staff may forget to make records and take that knowledge with them when they move on. Arrange a call with us if you have any concerns.

Digital Accessibility

It is really important to make sure your digital content is accessible. It’s the best way to make sure everyone can interact and use your content and should form part of your user experience. To find out what digital accessibility is and why it is important you can watch this webinar: Introduction to Digital Accessibility.

What next?

Hopefully this article has helped you uncover some new ideas and actions for your website. To learn more, you can read one of the articles linked below.

The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free 1-2-1 support to all arts and cultural organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up for our newsletter below and follow us on Twitter @ace_dcn for the latest updates.

Original article by Roberta Beattie.