Web development for websites that get results
Is your website attracting traffic? Is it generating leads? Can people find you on Google? Is it easy to read on all digital platforms?
If not, it’s likely that your website needs an upgrade.
Today the website is the foundation of any online marketing strategy. In most cases it is unthinkable to conduct a business without having a website (although some really small businesses start off very successfully just using social media to attract customers).
Yet if you have a website that is static, out-dated or not working to bring in business, then it’s much the same as not having one at all.
Questions to ask your web developer
When you choose a web developer to design your website, make sure that he or she understands your business objectives. A business-savvy web developer will give you loads of advice about what to do on your website to communicate better with your customers and get the results you want.
You should be talking about user experience, landing pages, customer conversion, calls to action, keywords, online content, what you want your customers to do on the website, and much more. If your developer does not offer you useful information on these issues, look for someone else.
All these topics need to be addressed before you talk about branding the site, what photographs or images to use, the layout, the content or whether you should have a slider or a flash on the home page.
And please, please NEVER sign up with a developer who fails to ask about your keywords or offer you an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) writing service.
Why is SEO so important?
If you build a website but don’t apply SEO, your site won’t be found. You may as well not build it! People now search for everything they want on the internet, most using Google. They type some keywords or a question into the search bar, click Enter, and get pages and pages of website links. These are the search engine results pages (SERP).
Those websites that appear on page 1 or 2 of the SERPs are the ones that are getting the highest ranking. Which is where you want to be, right?
To get there – which is quite a process – the first step is to optimise each page of your site with keywords (i.e. make sure there are enough of them in the right places). That’s why it’s called search engine optimisation. The keywords have to go into the headings and the body content on each page. They also have to go onto the page title, page description and URL (at the back end of the website). And you have to tell Google which keywords should be indexed on each page.
You also have to do a bunch of other stuff, like holding the attention of your visitors with good content by making it easy for them to find what they are looking for, building links from other places online (like social media), writing interesting and grammatically correct content, and regularly publishing new information on your site (like blogs, case studies and e-books) as well as online marketing campaigns.
If you don’t have the budget to do any of this, then don’t bother with a website. Rather talk to us about how you can just use social media to promote your business.
Why we develop in WordPress
- WordPress has an easy content management system (CMS). This means you can upload your own content, edit your pages or even create new pages yourself. You have 100% control over your WordPress site and you do not have to depend on a developer every time you want to make a change.
- Most developers can work in WordPress, which means if you want to switch developers, it’s easy to get someone else to take over the development or maintenance of the site.
- WordPress is SEO friendly. It’s framework is very easy to crawl, so search engines love it. And has various SEO plugins to help make your site more visible.
- More than 25% of the world’s websites are now designed in WordPress.
- WordPress has literally thousands of themes and plugins that allow you to quickly customise your site to any function or appearance you like.
Our WordPress partner, Andrew Lima, is a young developer who is currently doing innovative work with WordPress in South Africa.
But we’re not knocking HTML
In the hands of the right developer, static HTML has many advantages, particularly for creating highly customised functions.
Our favourite HTML developer, Andre Pretorius, has created his own content management system that is exceptionally easy to use. But he’s also a genius at building specialised systems that support very particular business processes.
This kind of HTML development is ideal for a business looking for a simple start-up solution that can be scaled up to include more complex, bespoke features at a later stage.