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Website development has come a long way since my first days building them more than 20 years ago. While it was enough then to create what equated to a digital brochure, today’s websites are often the first, and commonly, only, interaction a prospective customer may have with your business, and they need to include all of the elements necessary to turn that interaction into a sale.
What is expected and effective in a website has evolved along with society’s digital habits and impacts SEO ranking, user experience and total performance. It pays off to both take all of the essential elements into consideration, whether you are creating a new website or bringing an existing website up to date. (Did you realize that most websites have an effective lifespan of less than 3 years?)
This checklist from Web Commander can help you pinpoint updates that are needed or plan what you want to achieve with your new website, from the technical aspects of ensuring pages load quickly and display correctly across all platforms to developing the content that boosts SEO, enhances brand positioning and provides lead capture opportunities.
Ready to dig deeper? Here are some of our top blog posts that discuss the details included in the checklist.
Website First Impressions: User Experience, Content Presentation & Content Quality
Your Guide to Web Strategy & The State of Marketing: Drill down into this post for tips on how to optimize design and technical aspects of your website to make it a seamless experience for users. Including easy-to-use navigation, clean accessible design, and fast-loading pages with fewer barriers to use on mobile platforms is key.
6 Website Design Strategies: First impressions matter, so consider how your website appears to visitors the second they first set eyes on it. Check out these design recommendations for visual appeal that encourages visitors to stick around.
Website Content: Encouraging Engagement
Your Multi-Channel Content Marketing Checklist (Part 1: All About the Website): Your website’s content, from home page to business blog to landing pages for gated premium content, should all work together with the rest of a multi-channel approach. Read this blog post for a rundown of how to craft cohesive content across all channels, including the many content types included on your website.
A Start-to-Finish Checklist for Writing Website Copy: This is a back-to-basics guide that considers every detail of creating great website copy from headlines and main text to the calls-to-action that invite visitors to engage further with your company online.
Website Conversion Tips
4 Tricks to Improve Lead Conversion on Your Landing Pages: While website traffic is great, lead conversion is the first step in turning visitors into customers. This blog post offers four elements to optimize that improve the rate at which visitors become leads.
The Science Behind Lead Conversion Success: Need a fascinating, and useful, listen over lunch? The video by Kenda Macdonald shared here provides science-backed insights about what works—and doesn’t—in demand generation campaigns.
Driving Traffic through Social and Search
Social Media vs. Search Optimization: The B2B Marketing Perspective: This post highlights the strengths of both social media and search in driving success for businesses online. We talk about how to think of the two as complementary tools rather than conflicting interests.
Your Complete Social Media Guide: What, Where, When and How Often to Post: While this checklist is focused primarily on your company website, knowing how to maximize the traffic to your website by tying in social media, and vice versa, is essential to achieving your overall marketing goals. This blog post covers all the basics for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Instagram.
SEO: Search engine optimization is a little too complex to simply give you one blog post to refer to, so I’m linking you here to our entire library of SEO-focused posts. Scroll through for more detailed posts on how your website’s ranking can be influenced by technical elements such as page load speed and accessibility, along with content quality, voice search, page errors, trustworthiness and more.
If this checklist doesn’t quite fit your approach to assessing your current website or planning an upgrade, we have our own version that you can download here: Website Audit Template. Take a tour of how to put it to use in this blog post: How to Audit Your Existing Website.
If you’d like an outside perspective or are seeking a partner agency with the depth of experience to tackle all aspects of creating a new website or updating your existing one, schedule a time to talk with JONES CEO Kristin Jones. And learn more about our recent website projects in these links:
