Whether you or someone else designs your website, keep the following ten rules in mind to make sure that your website is as effective as it can possibly be. These simple rules can ultimately build trust with your visitors and lead to more potential leads from your wedding business website.
- Don’t use an excessive number of graphical elements – unnecessary photos, flashy buttons, banners, etc. Your visitors don’t want to wait around forever for your page to load (most will go elsewhere right away if your site doesn’t load quickly.) For photography sites, use thumbnails to represent your portfolio – let visitors choose the larger versions of the photos that interest them.
- DO NOT add audio files to your site that play automatically. Besides potentially scaring away users who might have their computer speakers turned up high, please remember that a good amount of your prospects will be looking at wedding sites during work hours – which means, at the office. Needless to say, it would be very embarrassing for your prospect if blaring music starts playing in front of coworkers or bosses. Don’t lose potential clients this way.
- Instead of thinking “selling” all the time, try to also think useful content and information. If your site answers many of the questions your prospect has, this is far more useful to them than another site that just offers some basic contact information and a sales pitch. This will build trust, which in turn may lead to more weddings booked. If you have a blog as part of your business website, this is a great place to educate your visitors about your area of expertise, provide insight on some of the local venues you’ve worked at along with photos, etc.
- Think SIMPLE and beautiful – make sure your site is easy to navigate, and has a consistent look and feel from page to page. DON’T use a different background for each page, more than one or two consistent fonts throughout the site, or a different navigational scheme from page to page.
- Anticipate what questions your prospects are most likely to have, and make sure that the answers are very easy to find once they reach your site (if they can’t find this information quickly, they’ll most likely give up and go elsewhere.)
- Think twice before using Flash, excessive JavaScript code or frames on your pages – each of these may hurt your potential search engine rankings and also may make your site less accessible depending on your end user’s web browser.
- Include a sitemap containing links to each page on your site, and make sure that each page also contains a link to your sitemap. This is helpful for your users, and may also have a positive effect on your search engine rankings since the search engines will be able to easily crawl through your site’s structure. An XML sitemap is the accepted standard for submitting your site’s structure to the search engines (check with your web company to see if they offer this option) while a regular HTML sitemap consisting of a simple list of links to your site’s pages should be sufficient as well, and should be implemented on your site even if you also create an XML version for the search engines.
- Add relevant internal and external links where appropriate throughout your site. Links are the lifeblood of the Internet, and as such, Google and the other search engines consider their placement when ranking sites across the web. Include relevant links to other pages on your own site within your content, as well as links to external websites that are relevant to the content on your page and would be a good resource for your visitors. ALWAYS keep the end user in mind – one well-placed resource link within an article on your website is far more helpful to the visitor than a page of nothing more than tens or hundreds of reciprocal links scattered about the page.
- Include a search engine and search box on your website if at all possible. While this may not be as important for smaller sites with just a handful of pages, it is crucial for large or product-based websites where users might get lost trying to find what it is they are looking for. Google offers a free Custom Search Engine for website owners seeking an alternative to hiring a web developer to create one.
- If you have pages for your business on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, add Follow buttons to those pages on your main website so that users have multiple ways to connect and stay in touch with you. If you offer an RSS feed for your blog or have a mailing list, make it easy for visitors to sign up for those as well by placing subscribe links within your site’s layout. It is a best practice to place these buttons and links on EACH page of your site, not just your homepage, as visitors who come in through the search engines may not necessarily land on your homepage depending on the keyword they typed in to find you. Also, if you write articles or blog posts on your site, consider adding social media sharing buttons to each article so that visitors who find your article useful can easily share it with their friends (at the very least, add a Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button to each article or post.) The free service AddThis makes adding social media sharing and following buttons easy and can accommodate integration into both blogs and standard websites.