What to know before building your website in 2020
Literally every business owner and individual owns a website in today’s world. There are so many articles emphasizing the need to have an online identity with a website. If you are considering getting your own website, either by building it yourself or hiring a web designer. There are a couple of things you should know – from deciding on the designs, the architecture, to the SEO optimization. If you are building a website for the sake of your business consider your target audience and what they might expect from your website, it should not solely be based on what you want.
There are a couple of things you should know about building a website in 2020
Security
Security is always going to be a big deal, it is most likely gets the most focus because the world currently runs on data, data is the new oil and people will go to extreme levels such as hacking to acquire data. People are very skeptical about putting their sensitive information, such as personal information and credit card details, on websites and when they do they are basically telling you they trust you and this trust is something you need to uphold. You need to ensure that you have top-notch security to not only protect you from hacking but malicious attacks from malware, viruses, etc. your website should have SSL certificates and regular security checks.
SEO
Without search engines including your website in their search results, you are not going to attract as many customers as you would want to. The only visitors to your page are those that have the URL which is counterproductive because one of the many reasons to have a website is to reach a wider audience. You could have the best website in terms of appearance and functionality but without traffic, you just have a good product, not a marketable one. It is important you have SEO friendly codes and you understand the dynamics of algorithms of the different search engines and how the rankings take place, they are forever evolving.
Design
The appearance of your website is important, people get carried away with wanting it to be functional and that is very important too, your visitors need to be able to navigate around with ease and understand what exactly you do by just moving around. There are a ton of websites out there, doing the same exact thing yours does, what will make yours stand out is if the appearance and that is something you need to leverage on. A good design also affects the SEO of a webpage.
Hosting
You need a good web hosting provider to ensure that people do not leave your page. If a page is always at capacity or the security is not as good, there is a high probability that people will turn away from your site. People in a bid to save money use the free hosting service not realizing they are just setting themselves up for failure. It might work out in the initial stage but as your business expands there will be a need to integrate more features that you can only get on a paid platform. There are so many web hosting providers to select from and what is best for your business is what you should be looking out for and not necessarily what other people might be using.
Social media linkage
At the bottom of most web pages, you see sharing options on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Email, Whatsapp, etc. This is also good for reaching a larger audience, not everyone is interested in copying the link to your site and pasting it on the platforms that they would like to share it one. It is important to fully integrate these options, people are very busy and providing tools that make things easier for them makes the work seamless. This is also a way to get your visitors to advertise your business, a good marketing tool.
Building a website is always going to be relevant but understanding the nitty-gritty is what helps you stand out. You also need to be conversant with data laws in your country, you could read the General Data Protection Regulation outline to have an idea of the dos and don’ts of collecting people’s data.
