How to Create an Award Winning Website in 5 Easy Steps

Every business in these modern times simply must have its own website. That’s not something hard to achieve and creating a website is a skill that’s relatively easy to learn even if you don’t have much tech knowledge or experience.

There are platforms that allow you to create a website with drop-and-drag tools, others require some basic coding knowledge, but all things considered, if you know how to use a computer and know how to follow instructions, then you can create a website on your own for sure. However, if you want your website to stand out among others and help you get over your competitors, then you must invest more time and effort. Creating an award-winning website isn’t such a simple thing to do, but anyone can do it, at least with the proper guidance.

In this article, we will offer you 5 easy steps you need to follow if you want to create an award-winning website. But before we go there, we will take a look at some of the reasons for having an award-winning website, from the business standpoint.

Why do you Need an Award-Winning Website?

As we have already said, we live in the times of the technological revolution. Everything is now done online and having even a great website is good for your business. Having an award-winning website, well, that can completely change your business for the better:

• The looks and functionality of your website determine the impression you leave on your potential customers. It reflects you as a business owner. So, if your website looks professional, you will look professional as well. Your potential clients will feel safe and trust you because they will think, since you were able to create an award-winning website, that you are successful and have enough money, which means that you have a lot of satisfied clients. It’s all about the presentation.
• An award-winning website draws more attention. For example, you will be able to get the media’s attention for sure, and that means more coverage and a great opportunity to spread your business and increase your revenue. The media coverage will, in turn, increase the attention you get from local, as well as global, prospects.
• Everybody is online Statistics show that more than a third of the entire world’s population has access to the Internet now and that online shopping is getting bigger with every passing year (and it is already big enough). That means that you must have the presence on the Internet. And having an award-winning website can make that presence larger and stronger.
• You can improve your SEO results with an award-winning website. To win an award for your website, it has to be an efficient Internet marketing tool that is able to increase the traffic you receive. You must also have an optimized website that is responsive and user-friendly if you want to get into the competition for the best website awards, so it is only logical that your SEO results will become better if you manage to create an award-winning website.

How to Create an Award-Winning Website?

Now that you know just how important it is to have a great website, particularly from the business standpoint, we can now talk about the things you can do to improve your website and make it a serious competitor that can stand out and win awards. To do this, you need to follow our 5 easy steps.

1. Structure and Navigation

Having a good, solid structure and navigation on your website can help you create a consistent, transparent and user-friendly website. If you make your website too complicated to navigate, your potential clients will quickly lose interest and leave your website. That means that you need to make your navigation as easy as possible, so your visitors can go where they want quickly and without any issues.

In this case, “less is more”, for real. Simplicity pays off when it comes to your website’s design and you need to make sure that your layout is simple and that navigation is easy to use. You must make sure that your products or services area is clearly visible on the homepage, as well as accessible. Your navigation bar must be straightforward; you don’t want your visitors to have to attend classes to learn how to use it. It also needs to be responsive, whether you access it from a mobile phone or a desktop computer.

The best way to check how well and simple the usability of your website is to test it using the 3-second rule; the Internet version, of course. This rule was developed in the 1990s by web designers and it is now accepted all around this community. This rule says that your website must get the full attention of your visitors in the time frame that is not longer than three seconds. If you need more time than this to engage your prospects, you will certainly lose them. You might not lose all, but surely the majority of your visitors.

If you want to make sure that your website is good enough to pass this test, you need to make all content clear and make it easy to understand. Don’t use too many quality graphics on every page; just a few of them will do the trick. Also, you should try to devise a strategy that will bring the attention of your visitors to the most popular information you have on your website. You can even use your friends or family members in an experiment to see how long they take to navigate through your website. That can give you the necessary information about the usability of your website.

2. Visual Experience

Another important factor that has a lot of effect on your website’s performance, award-wise, is the visual experience, or simply put, visual design. Visual experience is a lot more than just having a beautiful homepage. It must be of top quality, relevant and appropriate for the visitors and the message that it should convey. The design of your website allows your readers to experience it in a specific way and to become more interested in your content.

To create a visual experience that will help you engage your visitors, your website should be smooth, easy to use and navigate and sophisticated. This doesn’t mean that creating visual experience ends when you design your website, but it also entails using white space appropriately.

Blank spaces that accompany different elements on your website are called white space. When you use white space the way you should, you will be able to create an elegant atmosphere and improve your brand positioning. Also, white space can enhance content understanding for your visitors and audience.

This approach is minimalistic, aesthetic and sleek, and if it is used properly, it will also be extremely beautiful. A homepage that is too crowded with content, even if that content is visual in nature, can make your visitors feel chaotic and confused. That is why award-winning websites, in most cases, employ simplicity and make good use of white spaces.

3. Content

To make your website engaging for your audience, you must create appropriate and high-quality content. That content must be relevant for your visitors, but it also has to be concise and easy to understand. The content that you create on your website speaks volumes about your company, your point of view and your business motto. It should be informative, helpful and attractive. You can also make it funny, which leaves your visitors in a good mood and always wanting more.

Another thing you need to think about when you consider your content is SEO rules. If you want your website to perform well, you need to become familiar with SEO and what you can do to improve your content in an SEO-friendly way in order to rank higher on Google and other search engines. This might not help you win an award for your website, but it can surely help you increase your revenue and improve and grow your business.

When you think about your content and how it affects your website’s popularity and overall performance, you need to consider another important way in which you can improve these things. Adding customer reviews, as well as exclusive deals can help you make your audience more engaged and interested in your business.

This is particularly true if you have a website that runs on e-commerce basis. Displaying some positive customer reviews and a few exclusive offers, or coupon codes, or any other form of promotion can make your visitors take the desired course of action – buying your products. Your conversion rate will benefit from these things, but remember the 3-second rule we mentioned before. This all needs to be displayed in an organized and engaging manner.

4. Speed and Simplicity

We have already talked about simplicity when we talked about the navigation on your website, but now we will talk about it again in terms of increasing your conversion rate. To increase your conversion rate, you need to have a simple and short checkout process. Making your checkout process easy and straightforward will give the necessary incentive to many of your visitors to buy your products. A good example of this is Amazon since they offer one-click buying option in addition to their already simplified checkout process.

Right next to simplicity is speed, when the functionality of your website is in question. You can’t have an award-winning website simply thanks to its looks or design. Functionality features matter as much, and speed is one of the most important things you need to worry about.

Once again, this is especially true for e-commerce websites. Slow speed when it comes to loading pages, as well as problems with the website on mobile phones and devices will surely negatively affect your conversion rate. It might even affect your overall corporate revenues, of course, negatively. Various statistics show that almost half of all online shoppers won’t wait more than three seconds for a page to load and that the overall speed of a website plays an important role in their loyalty to the website in question.

The easiest way to improve your speed is to get your engineers to deal with it, but there are certain things you can do to increase your website’s speed as well. You can leverage browser caching, make landing page redirects cacheable, use a CDN, minimize redirects, minimize your codes, avoid bad requests, etc.

5. Use Responsive Design

Having a responsive website is a necessary condition to even be considered for any kind of award. Responsive design enables you to display your content and layout on any device, like computers, mobile devices, e-readers, laptops, etc.

Creating a website with a responsive design is an investment that will pay off in multiple ways. First, it will optimize the way your visitors interact with your website on many devices. Second, it will enhance your search engine traffic, which means that it has a positive SEO effect as well. But the biggest benefit that comes with responsive design lies in simple numbers. The more devices you cover, the more visitors you will have and that is great for business.

Among other advantages, the cost effectiveness of a responsive website also stands out. Instead of having to create two separate websites to cover the same audience, you can do that for the price of one website. Also, maintenance costs are very low and that is another way that responsive design can pay off in the long run.

Wrapping Up

Just remember, having an award-winning website can be beneficial on so many levels and can help your business grow to become more successful than you have ever imagined. In the word of technological advancements in which we live in, having a great website is probably even more important than having a great product. We hope that our tips and tricks will be helpful when you start creating your website and that you will end up with an award-winning website pretty soon.

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