Is Your Website Soooo 1997? Basic Boxy and Boring Websites

We at Wordflirt® recently gave our website a makeover, as we do every year or so. Things change constantly, and with the demands of helping our clients look good, we sometimes look a bit crusty ourselves. As I do with my clients, I like to include the following features that bring a website more current:

• A wide, broad look across the page, beginning with a large image at the top, also known as a “hero” area. This captures the attention of the visitor, and usually contains a call to action.
• Responsive technology – this is a must for every website, because about 80% of website visitors these days are viewing your site from a mobile device such as a phone or tablet.
• Animation of features, such as counters, and flip boxes. These are highlight areas on the page, which move when you come to them, or hover over them.
• A parallax affect that makes a site appear to have layers so that when you scroll, part of the background image is still visible but moves with the text. I love this look!
• More images, less text. Sure, you want to give as much information about you and your product/service as possible, but we don’t recommend doing this on the homepage. Inner pages are a better place for more detail, and even then, it should be broken up into small paragraphs and images that represent what you’re trying to say.
• Social sharing is an absolute must. Google likes to see that you provide the opportunity to share parts of your website on social channels. Each page and post should have sharing links for all the main social media venues.
• Video backgrounds used cautiously. Video backgrounds on the homepage look really cool once they finally load. Therein lies the problem. Video, if not done properly, can slow the loading speed of the homepage, which can lead to two problems – one, your user gets impatient and leaves and, two, Google penalizes you for slow content.
• Contact information on every page. In addition to the actual contact info, we like to put contact boxes on most of the pages to make it easy for visitors to contact the website owner. In older site designs, you often had to hunt around for the contact information, making it burdensome.