Every Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Can Afford These 3 Basics of a Successful Website

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Is your business website instantly welcoming? With more and more online-only experiences and business operations, it’s increasingly important that your website deliver a stellar first impression.

You want your site to provide people with an experience akin to a classy department store that makes customers feel important and taken care of. Sadly, many of today’s websites resemble the online versions of outlet shops, where you dig through unattended piles of random stuff searching for what you need.

In 2018, it’s not enough to solve your customer’s problems. There are likely at least half a dozen other businesses doing that. You need to go beyond providing features to providing a seamless user experience (UX) in the process as well.

According to UX pioneer Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb framework, at the very least, you need to ensure that your site’s content is useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible and credible.

Address the following basics, and you’ll be well on your way there.

1. Build on a solid foundation.

For a user experience that delivers, your website needs a strong foundation to match. Your website needs to reliably deliver the same experience, regardless of the device and operating system people use to access it. Make sure you build your website to load quickly, reliably and securely for any visitor, or people will give up and go elsewhere.

Use a trusted host for your website to keep downtime to a rarity. You can use a content delivery network (CDN) as well, to boost speed and improve reliability. Minimizing load times is quickly becoming a business-critical objective as mobile becomes the standard for web access.

Every element of your website experience needs to adapt to small screens as seamlessly as it does a desktop computer. You can use Google’s free mobile site testing tool to receive a complete assessment, including personalized tips for optimization.

The ways in which customers can interact with your brand online are constantly changing, and you need…