We post a lot of articles about how to plan for your new website design. But what if you already have a website and you just want to tweak it a little bit to improve its overall effectiveness?  These five tips will help you improve your existing website to help it get found, be easier to navigate, and look better.

1. Clean up your navigation
Nothing is worse than coming to a website and being inundated by 100 navigation links listed down the left column. Visitors find this not only confusing, but cluttered. If you have this scenario going on, try to group your links under headers, use drop down navigation, or use limited sub-navigation on your internal pages. By doing this you not only make your site easier to navigate, but you group pages that can cross link to each other—the search engines like it when you do that. You may even find that your bounce rate goes down because people aren’t tempted to click on another link with a more intriguing name.

2. Use web friendly fonts
Web friendly fonts are fonts that can be displayed by all browsers and all operating systems. By using fonts that are not web friendly, you take the risk that your font will not show up the way it is meant to when your users view it. Instead, it will be replaced by a default font. That means your website text may be entirely too difficult to read. Another mistake is to use images in place of headlines, or in places where you want a special font. When you do this search engines can’t index that text. Headlines are extremely important to search engine optimization–especially if they contain keywords. 

3. Make your text easy to read
Using web friendly fonts will go a long way to help your visitors read your content. However, reading online is never as easy as reading printed material. Your visitors are scanning your content more than they are reading it. They are looking for clues to information so they don’t have to read every word. To serve them better, make your paragraphs short, and use headlines, bullet-lists, and subheads to break up large bodies of copy.

4. Increase the size of your website
15-inch monitors used to rule back in the early 90s. Nowadays, most business monitors are 19″ or larger. If your website is five years old or older, you need to increase the width or your site. Not only will it make your image more up-to-date, but it will be much less scrolling for your visitors. The added space will also allow you to add bigger, better images, or more white space – both of which are always a welcome change.

5. Optimize your images
Speaking of images, if you have a lot of photos, or even a photo album, you must optimize your images for the web. This helps to reduce the download time for your visitors, and it will reduce your bandwidth usage (which many hosting companies charge extra for). If you’re not sure how to do this there are free online tools you can use. This link will get you started.

And if you’re ready to make the leap and get a website that is built to achieve results from the very start, contact us and we’ll get you headed in the right direction.