5 essential components required to build your own website

So you have decided to build your own website, but finding it difficult to find where to start. Here are a few things that you need before you start to build that site.

1. Great content

Having good solid content is as important as having a great design. When users visit your site, the content is the key to your sales pitch or your product. The ability to sell who you are and what you do is vitally important and is linked to your content. The content doesn’t only mean text but it could be videos or images that are used to sell you!

2. User-friendly Navigation

If your website is difficult to use or to find what you need then your customers will go elsewhere. User wants to find what they need easily and without fuss. So before you open that design software or install that website CMS, sketch out your website structure and list what you want to add to your site and consider the relationship between the sections of your site. When designing your site keeping consistency is important. Have your navigation in the same place, keep it simple and don’t move it.

3. Good Fonts.

One of the most important design elements of any website is having easy-to-read text, which comes with great fonts. If you have more than 1 font on a site this can help to differentiate between headings and text but can also be used as a call to action to encourage a user to visit a certain page or complete a certain action. If a section has a completely different font to what you use for your body text or headings this can look visually different to the rest of your page.

Just remember not to go overboard with your fonts, as it’s a good rule of thumb to have one font for headings, one for text and one for distinctive calls to action, but you could accomplish this with just two fonts. If you have many fonts on a site then this can look unprofessional and messy. Try to remember that consistency is key.

4. Good images

Having great images on the site can help sell your product or service. I’m sure we have all visited a food site that has appetising images of food that makes you salivate by looking at them.

Try to use professional images and stay away from the generic stock images that are littered on so many corporate sites, if your budget affords consider using a professional especially if you plan on using headshots on your website. A visitor is not going to be impressed by that picture of you on the beach or in the pub with your mates.

If you are on a tight budget consider some of the free stock sites such as Unsplash or Pexels which have some high-quality images on the sites, but don’t go overboard with images as this could create a negative effect or could make a site look cluttered and stay away from that clipart.

5. A good call to action

A call to action is a prompt to get a visitor to accomplish a task on your website. Do you want to sell that great product you have or do you want the visitor to know what you are passionate about or what your business offers? Then having a great call to action is key.

When considering a good call to action, it is important that you guide the visitor to the important page or product, let them know exactly what they need to do, and where this action is going to take them. For example “Why not visit our discount page to get your exclusive offers and savings?”

So before you start on that site, be sure to consider how your site will work and what objectives you have for the site. Have a clear plan set out as this will help you hit your targets. Plan before you jump.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and some of the considerations you have when setting up your site