Making the most of your website

Do you have a website and if so, is it enticing new clients to your salon?Business Development Consultant Angela Lunn gives you vital information about how to gauge success and the best ways to make the worldwide web work for you.

What Is A Successful Site?

Many people think the idea is to create a site, get a top search engine listing and bring in more visitors to the site. However, there is no direct link between a high volume of traffic to your site and an increase in clients. Of course, getting visitors to your site is important, but what matters is the percentage of visitors you convert to clients. That conversion rate determines whether you have a valuable website as a marketing tool or just another marketing expense.A common mistake many individuals make is forgetting the reasons why potential clients will visit your site. Plan and design with an understanding of the wants and needs of your potential new client. Remember, simple navigation along with useful information and good quality content and images are what a user needs.

Key Considerations

Keep It Simple

• Avoid having more than 12 words to a line of text
• Steer clear of unnecessary animated graphics, scrolling text or other moving items all over the place
• Don’t overcrowd a page with too much information and too many links – the user won’t know what to look at first
• Make it easy for users to find the information they are looking for – fast.

Put Your Visitors First

• Remember who you’re providing the site for
• Don’t sacrifice usability for design.

Branding

• Maintain your salon branding across all pages of your site.

Content Is Key

• Keep the content on your site updated
• Encourage people to come back with ‘news’ or ‘highlights’ sections on your homepage
• Think about your headlines – they must match what users are looking for.

Don’t Get Caught Up In Traffic

• Don’t give up just because you don’t have a top search engine listing
• Create an effective online presence before spending money on search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Get the structure right so that you have a site that’s worth promoting.

Keep Track Of Your Data

• Periodically analyse your site data and identify pages that visitors exit from and ‘length of stay’ to identify what is and isn’t working.

Top Tips

Less is more

Keep sentence structure short and simple as possible – avoid essays

Highlight important key words or phrases

Use bullet points where possible

Keep page length short – avoid too much vertical scrolling, which annoys the reader

Use highlighted links to navigate the user to further information

Centred text is harder to read

Try to use italics for emphasis only

Use a pale background with dark text

Use a dark background with light text.

Angela Lunn has 15 years’ hairdressing industry experience, along with a further six years working within the professional services sector, focusing on people management and business development and communications.