What is a website audit?

A website audit is an examination of the performance of your website. An audit can help you determine whether or not your website is optimized for the amount of traffic you are expecting to have in the new year.

In layman’s terms, a website audit is like going to a doctor to prepare yourself for a marathon. You check to see if your body is prepared for it. Or you receive suggestions on what you need to get in shape and make a plan.

What should a website audit include?

A full website audit should include marketing and sales goals, data analytics, UI/UX design, and evaluation of the CMS to see if it’s currently working with your needs and goals, usability, consistency, accessibility, content, security, and other technical aspects.

For the purpose of this article, we will concentrate on the importance of evaluating the technical aspects of a WordPress website audit, such as security, performance, coding standards, vulnerabilities, speed, and checking the most updated versions of plugins, themes, and WordPress.

Technical Evaluation

Why is a technical evaluation important? What’s in it for the business?

A technical evaluation is important because if the website has aspects that do not function properly, your users (audience/clients) may not be able to achieve their main objective of visiting your website. They will leave, and you want your company to stand out among your competitors.

How long does a technical evaluation take?

We know that time is money, so it is essential to highlight that a technical website audit usually takes between 2-4 weeks, depending on the size and complexity of your website. It will usually start with diagnosing your site, which includes scanning your URL to detect any viruses and malware, which is any malicious code that allows unauthorized access to your site, that hackers might have installed.

What does a website audit entail?

A website audit from WebDevStudios means we examine or look within all your posts, pages, and comments for malicious codes or URLs and create a report. This gives us more insight into your website’s performance, including technical SEO, page speed, user experience scored, and security.

Other items we look for during a website audit are:

• A diagnosis of your site’s health to analyze any critical information about your core configuration and even get more granular to the level of reviewing other technical aspects of your website, such as the theme you are currently using.
• An evaluation of the installed plugins and the media and determine if these are up to date and hurting your website’s speed.
• Reviewing the code to determine any errors within it.

Besides checking the items previously mentioned, it is vital to check the integrity of your files. The main objective of this is to detect any file changes in the operating system and web servers.

During this process, “fingerprints” of your site’s files are evaluated and then compared the files against WordPress original files to determine if any files have been changed.

Accessibility Matters

Accessibility is another important component of your website audit, an often overlooked element. Auditing accessibility matters because you want your website to be accessible to people with disabilities, like website visitors who are blind, have hearing problems, have cognitive impairments, and such. Make sure that people with different abilities can access your website.

When should you have a website audit?

Performing an audit is recommended when:

• Changing the website company that helps you maintain and support your website
• You are not obtaining leads from your website
• You are an eCommerce site and want to make sure that your client’s information is secured
• Your website is not ranking in search engines

Sometimes malicious code or files are encrypted or hidden, making it hard to be caught at first glance. Therefore you require professionals to ensure that any encrypted code is malicious or not without breaking your site.

Detecting issues at an early stage is very important. Doing so allows you to mitigate and limit any attack or damage. With a new year approaching, we suggest starting your 2023 off right with a website audit.

Take a moment to spot issues before they become a real threat to the security or functionality of your website. Contact WebDevStudios to schedule your next website audit.

The post Start Your New Year Right With an Audit of Your Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what gamification is and take a look at some gamification examples around the web. Then we’ll check out some interesting gamification statistics and brainstorm some ideas for adding gamification to your website.

What Is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of adding game-like elements to applications in an attempt to increase engagement by motivating users. Gamification can be found in many settings and industries, such as business, education, fitness, software, apps, and website technology.

In business, elements of games can give people a sense of fun in an environment that would otherwise feel like work. On your website, gamification is a deliberate strategy to increase user engagement, and it can also enhance motivation and loyalty.

Elements of Gamification

You can gamify a non-game system, such as your website or app, by using a variety of components. Here are some of the most common.

Points

The basic attribute of any game or gamified application is the collection of points. They are awarded for activity on your website and will add up as the user takes action across the system.

This gives the user a direct and simple method to see their progress. Points are allocated in different ways, such as for experience or reputation. They add up over time, contribute toward achievements, or are redeemed for rewards.

Badges and Achievements

Badges and achievements usually go hand-in-hand, with the user earning a badge for achieving specific milestones within the system. In video games, achievements are awarded for completing long-term or difficult tasks.

As elements of gamification, achievements are awarded once a user has reached a certain number of points or completed a series of activities. The user earns a badge that is displayed on their profile.

Leaderboards and Competitions

In gamified systems that feature leaderboards, users compete against each other and are ranked according to points accrued or achievements. Apps might also create competitions between users in which people will compete for the highest score in a set time frame.

Scores are displayed publicly so that users can compare their progress against their competitors. Competitions are arranged in teams or played by individual users.

Unlocks

Both points and achievements are used to unlock new game elements once the user has reached a certain threshold. For example, once users attain a certain number of points, they might be awarded new privileges within the system. Or, having completed certain achievements, the user might be presented with new challenges.

Progress and Completeness Bars

Progress bars and completeness trackers are ways to encourage users to complete all steps in a particular series. For example, this is commonly used to help people fill out all pieces of their user profiles.

Adding a profile photo, location, and other details will move the progress bar toward completion. Completeness bars can also be used to guide customers along the process of requesting a quote, completing a purchase, or filling out a long form.

Random Chance

A traditional form of gamification that’s easy to implement is random chance. This has been used at work, school, and home for centuries.

People use chore wheels to assign chores to family members by spinning a wheel. Drawing numbers out of a hat is another common way to use the random chance to make decisions.

Even though it’s random, it can help people feel more motivated to participate in tasks because they know they weren’t singled out for the chore and that it will change next time. Many card games, board games, and video games rely heavily on random chance to progress game elements.

Gamification Examples

Gamification can be found around the web in a variety of ways that you are probably already interacting with, but might not have noticed.

Social Media

Reddit is a great example of a social media website/app that uses different elements of gamification:

• Users gain “Karma” points, which are awarded by other people in the form of upvotes on their posts or comments.
• Users can give awards to each other, which are displayed on an individual post and in the user’s profile with icons and titles.
• Users gain trophies, which are similar to badges, for certain milestones like numbers of years on the app or for taking actions like verifying their email address.

Stack Overflow is a message forum website where people can ask questions related to programming and development. The platform uses these gamification techniques:

• Users gain points when other people upvote their questions and answers. Some activities award larger amounts of points, such as when a user’s answer is marked as “accepted.”
• Then, these points are shown as reputation earned, and indicate how helpful a user has been in answering questions.
• As users gain reputation points, new privileges are unlocked, including the ability to ask questions. Users must first be helpful before they can receive help.
• Badges are awarded at increasing levels of reputation.

Social media websites and apps like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are gamified with likes and shares. Those add up by post, instead of contributing to a user’s overall score, and they motivate people to create more content and improve their posts to garner more likes and shares.

Education and Training

Treehouse is a website that offers online courses on web development and related coding topics. It’s a fantastic example of gamification in an educational setting with points, badges, and learning tracks.

• Learners gain points when taking important actions on the platform, such as completing quizzes, doing code challenges, finishing courses, and participating in forums.
• When users gain achievements they earn a badge that’s displayed on their profile.
• Courses are arranged into tracks, which are collections of courses on a related topic that move a learner from beginner to advanced skill level. These keep students motivated as they see their progression through the track.

Health and Fitness

Fitness trackers like Fitbit and Apple Watch include a lot of gamification to make workouts more motivating and fun. For example, Fitbit users aim for goals like the number of steps per day, resting heart rate, pounds lost, and the number of minutes exercised per week.

• Data from workouts is tracked and displayed on a dashboard.
• A number of steps is counted and displayed throughout the day.
• Weight loss or maintenance is tracked and displayed graphically.
• Users earn badges for reaching specific goals.

Fitbit also includes virtual events and competitions. Users can compete against each other in daily or weekly goals, but they can also participate in “Fitbit Adventures” where they use their real-life steps to follow virtual trails, reach destinations, and collect hidden items.

Work and Business

Gamification can be built into our daily working lives. Here at WebDevStudios, we use a Slack integration called HeyTaco that helps employees build relationships and give each other kudos for a job well done.

HeyTaco works by allowing users to give each other taco emojis in Slack or Microsoft Teams. They’re typically used to say thank you, good job, or congratulations. It goes a long way toward building camaraderie, especially in a remote work environment.

HeyTaco includes a few elements of gamification:

• Tacos add up like points.
• A monthly leaderboard ranks employees based on how many tacos they received that month.
• Tacos are exchanged for real-world rewards, set by the organization, such as gift cards or extra time off.

A 2019 study found that 89% of employees said that gamification made them feel more productive and 88% said it made them feel happier at work. Eighty-nine percent also said that when a task is gamified, they feel competitive and eager to complete it. (Source)

LinkedIn even has some gamification in the form of skill badges. Users take skill assessments, and if they score in the top 30%, they earn a badge that will display on their profile. The promise of a reward for a high score makes the skill assessments feel more important to the user, and it’s also useful information for potential employers.

Gaming

Gamification is even found within gaming systems themselves. For example, Xbox Game Pass members earn Microsoft Rewards points by playing games that are included with the Xbox Game Pass library.

• Players earn points by playing Game Pass games daily and weekly.
• The points are tracked within the user’s profile in the Xbox console and mobile app.
• These points are redeemable for rewards like Xbox gift cards, in-game content, movies, and more.

Gold Stars

Other forms of basic gamification exist in our daily lives. In elementary school, teachers sometimes award gold stars for good behavior or exceptional grades.

The stars are shown on a board next to each student’s name. This gamification takes the form of both points and a leaderboard and motivates kids to do well in school.

Website and App Gamification Statistics

Most website owners would like to improve certain stats on their website, like the bounce rate, time spent on the site, and the number of pages viewed. Higher user engagement with a website should lead to an increase in conversions and revenue.

• Gamifying your website can boost browsing time by up to 30%. (Source)
• A fully engaged customer tends to net an average of 23% premium in terms of profitability. Actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount. (Source)
• Gamifying a website boosts comments by 13%, social sharing by 22%, and content discovery by 68%. (Source)
• Gamifying a website can lead to a 100-150% increase in engagement metrics including unique views, page views, community activities, and time on site. (Source)

These companies experienced measurable success with their website and app engagement rates due to gamification:

• Duolingo used gamification in language learning efforts to help grow its user base to more than 300 million. (Source)
• After introducing gamification to its mobile app, Foursquare expanded by 10 times within a five-year period. (Source)
• In 2018, Roblox launched its Roblox Education program, which helped increase the number of active Roblox users to over 90 million in a year. (Source)
• Autodesk used gamification to increase its trail usage rate by 40%, with conversion rates increasing by 15%. (Source)
• The logistics company Kenco saw a 45% increase in sales after using a sales gamification tool. (Source)
• Ford Motors increased sales by more than $8 million and boosted Facebook likes by 600% with gamified content. (Source)
• Coop saw an 39% average increase in spend amongst customers who stayed engaged with its gamification system long enough to collect a prize. (Source)
• Masai experienced a 50% cost-per-lead reduction. (Source)
• Samsung Nation increased its customer product reviews by 500% and site visits by 66%. (Source)
• Teleflora increased traffic by 105% and conversion rates by 92%. (Source)
• IBM has shown a 299% increase in comments posted. (Source)
• Texas bank Extraco tested a gamified process that taught clients about its offers and benefits, which led to a rise in conversion rate, from 2% to 14%, and raised customer acquisitions by 700%. (Source)

Ideas for Gamification of Your Website

Gamification is easy to apply to most websites with a little creativity and web development. Start with these ideas.

Gamification of eCommerce Websites

eCommerce websites are well positioned to take advantage of gamification since they already have a user database that can be expanded upon to include gamification elements like points and discounts.

Points and Progress Bars

A progress bar, shown prominently on the website, can track the customer’s number of purchases. The progress bar fills based on point accumulation for every purchase and amount spent.

Badge Achievements

Specific call-to-actions (CTAs) earn users badges and achievements. These CTAs are commonly used.

• Follow the company on social media
• Share an invitation to the website with a friend
• Use a coupon
• Sign up for the email list
• The customer’s first order
• Order number milestones such as 10 orders, 20 orders, etc.

Spin a Wheel

Displaying a wheel with various prizes such as discounts or free shipping is enticing. The user spins the wheel, which lands on a prize and adds the reward to their account.

Product Recommender

Product recommenders are like quizzes that allow the user to find the products they’re looking for. The user selects from product attributes and the results of the quiz show the customers which of the store’s products meet their needs.

Checkout Progress Bar

Users stay on track by monitoring the progress bar during checkout. It shows the stages of the checkout, such as shipping, billing, and review. This lets the user know what to expect during checkout and where they are within the process.

Gamification of Business and Professional Service Websites

Professional service websites include businesses like creative studios, web development agencies, marketing agencies, health industry businesses (clinics, doctors, dentists), lawyers, accountants, insurance, cleaning services, home repair services, and more. These businesses sell services instead of products, but many of the gamification methods for eCommerce apply here as well.

Product Recommender

If your business offers different levels of service, such as different packages, a product recommender is an interactive way to let clients discover which of your packages is best for them. The user selects from package attributes and the results of the quiz show them which of the services best meets their needs.

Completeness Tracker

If your website includes a database of user accounts, it can be beneficial to encourage your clients to fill out their profile. A completeness tracker can motivate them to input data like their location, times available for meetings/appointments, user photos, budget range, and preferred types of services. You can request the data that’s important to your business.

Achievements and Badges

The completion of action items can result in achievement levels and badges. Here are some common examples.

• Following the company on social media
• Sharing an invitation to the company with a friend
• Signing up for the email list
• Completing a large project with the company
• Keeping up with recommended activities (like six-month dental checkups or annual home maintenance)

Gamification of SaaS Websites

Software-as-a-Service websites can take advantage of gamification in training and sales. Some of the top SaaS companies include Salesforce, HubSpot, G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Amazon Web Services, and Dropbox.

In addition to the sales and purchasing ideas mentioned earlier, SaaS websites can make great use of gamification in educational training for their product.

Some education and training ideas are:

• Award the user achievements and badges for watching training videos.
• Give the user different amounts of points for completing different tasks. Some activities might award more points, such as 10 for watching a video, and 20 for passing a quiz.
• Guide the user through the process of setting up the software for their business with a completion tracker.
• Award the user a downloadable certificate when they have successfully passed a course.

Gamification of News, Review, Blog, and Informational Websites

Informational websites include news websites, product review websites, personal blogs, professional/industry blogs, or advice columns. Text articles mostly make up the composition of these sites, which lack complex features like eCommerce.

While these websites might not directly sell products, they can still benefit from some of the same elements of gamification. Think about ways to include these elements:

• Encourage website visitors to sign up for your email list with a spinning wheel of prizes. Prizes can be anything that makes sense for the topic you write about.
• If you review products, you can treat them like any e-commerce site would, and offer a recommendation quiz that will help users find the content they’re looking for.
• Include a “Surprise me!” button that sends users to a random article.
• Run giveaway contests for special content like books written by the authors of the website.
• Add interaction that’s similar to social media, such as a robust comments feature with upvotes and downvotes. If your site has a user database, you could rank commenters by the number of comments.
• Include interactive elements that give the reader something to do. Buzzfeed quizzes are a great example of this.
• Embed social media posts, especially from your readers, to build a community and take advantage of social media’s built-in gamification of likes and shares.

Conclusion

Gamification is a compelling way to add interaction and fun to your website. Moreover, it can enhance websites in any industry by using game-like elements such as points, badges, and progress bars.

Statistics show that gamification improves user engagement, motivation, and ultimately revenue. That said, it’s worth gamifying your website to cash in on these benefits.

The post Gamification of Your Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

49% of internet users expect to continue shopping online after COVID. (GWI)

Digital strategy is the strategic plan formulated to achieve specific goals in the digital space. It’s basically about answering the question, “Where do we want to be in three to five years?” Attracting more visitors to your site, increasing their time on site, more leads, and conversions are examples of the kinds of answers that will help you build a successful digital strategy. Whatever your answer is, it should be customer-focused.

We’ve put together a list of five tips to help you build a successful digital strategy in 2021.

1. Have a Game Plan

Website redesigns are costly, and scope creep can cause unnecessary increases in both budget and timelines, if not handled correctly. What is scope creep? Put simply, scope creep happens when the original scope of a project changes and additional features arise during the development stage of the project without an additional budget. Without a clear plan, you can quickly find your project over budget and past the deadline.

How do I make a game plan?

There are several ways to approach creating your game plan, and there’s no boilerplate answer. Some strategies are not necessary for every project, and the best way to start the discussion is to ask, “What do we need to accomplish with this project?” Each project has different goals and priorities; no two strategies will be the same, but here are a few questions to get the wheels turning.

What’s your digital marketing strategy?

It’s relatively common to mistake digital strategy and digital marketing strategy. While digital strategy is strategic in nature, digital marketing strategy is more tactical, like a series of actions you’d take to attract, engage, and convert customers online. Things like running social media campaigns, paid search (PPC), and YouTube advertising are examples of digital marketing strategies.

How you go about planning your digital strategy will depend on the digital marketing strategy you have. If you’re planning on pushing customers to product landing pages instead of the homepage, you need to consider what elements you need to have on those pages to help guide them to where they need to go and where you want them to end up.

What’s the vision of the brand?

Has the company’s branding, goals, or objectives recently changed? Have you adopted a new style and voice for your product to help differentiate you from your competitors?

Your brand vision is about the ideas behind your brand that inspire you, your employees, and your customers. They give a clear direction to your company and help inform your strategies.

94% of the world’s population recognizes the Coca-Cola logo. (The Coca-cola Company)

Defining your organization’s values is vital as these guidelines will reflect in your brand’s behavior and differentiate you in the marketplace. These values help build brand awareness and recognition and ultimately lead to better conversions.

Why do you want to change your website?

Fundamentally, this question is asking about goals. Why do you want to change your website? Are you looking to improve the responsive experience of your site? Do you want to attract more visitors to your website? Are you launching a new digital marketing strategy that requires new user flows like landing pages and product-specific content and conversion methods?

All of these are great questions to ask to ascertain the goal of this project. It can also help inform whether this is a one-off project or a more complex project with phases.

2. Ensure Your Brand Is on Brand

In the race to grow your business and establish a successful digital strategy, it can be easy to overlook the importance of your company’s branding. We touched on the importance of having a clear voice and values for your brand to help you stand out from the competition, but let’s talk a bit about how your visual branding impacts how you build brand awareness.

Let’s look at a few industry stats:

1. Color improves brand recognition by up to 80%. (Forbes)
2. Branding consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. (Forbes)
3. Over 70% of brand managers consider building an audience more important than converting sales. (Bynder)
4. 43% of customers spend more money on brands they are loyal to. (Fundera by NerdWallet)
5. 64% of consumers purchase a product after watching a branded video on social networks. (Forbes)

Designers like to use the Nike logo as the shining example of how a brand built itself so well that it no longer even needs to use the name in its advertising for people to recognize the branding. While we all can’t be Nike, you can build your own visual identity to increase awareness.

Having a style guide for your brand that includes specific colors, fonts, logos, and ways to use them helps you create a consistent look and feel across all your platforms and increase your brand awareness.

Another way to bring your branding and content to life is to have a unique voice supporting and enhancing your product. Whether that voice is casual and playful like Target, or dependable and strong like Ford, or even a little absurd like Old Spice, their marketing sticks in your brain and helps you remember them even if you’re not loyal to that brand.

3. Create User Personas and Stories

Your website’s goals are an essential part of building a successful digital strategy, but those goals may not always align with your users’ needs. Understanding their needs and how they are currently using your product can give you insights into where you are losing potential conversions.

A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on your user research. It allows you to target your real audience and incorporate their needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns.

Creating user personas allows you to understand:

1. Your ideal customer
2. The current behavior patterns of your users
3. The needs and goals of your users
4. User issues and pain-points

Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful website. Personas will enable you to efficiently identify and communicate user needs, allowing you to effectively step out of your shoes and into theirs while designing your product. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product to your team members, which is essential to your overall value proposition and team buy-in.

To build useful user personas, we have to look through analytics, and conduct user research through user interviews. Let’s look a little closer at these terms.

Figure out what your users want.

Using analytics from your current site (or if you’re a brick and mortar shop, you can look at sales trends) can jumpstart the deep dive into your user base. Metrics, such as how long people are spending on your site, where they’re looking, and what devices they’re using to access your site, all live in the analytics.

Some of the most useful information we can find in analytics is based on demographics. You can review the age range and the gender of your audience. Further research can reveal things like age ranges that generate the most revenue, have the best conversion rate, and even how many sessions each age range has. This information can help guide your decisions on how you want to tailor your product, allowing you to market to the right audience.

Talk it out.

Conducting in-person or virtual interviews allows you to discover your UX’s pain points by meeting actual users. Most user interviews consist of a series of predefined tasks that users complete, followed by a one-on-one consultation. A series of questions around the tasks and the user’s experience completing them will give you invaluable information on how easy your product is to use.

Some basic UX questions to ask in interviews are:

1. What type of workarounds have you created to help you with this?
2. What’s the most challenging part about the problem/task?
3. What are you currently doing to make this problem/task easier?
4. What other products or tools have you tried out?
5. What do you like or dislike about other products or tools?
6. Are you looking for a solution or alternative for the problem/task?

Asking questions like this allows you to understand where your users are having issues and how they are currently working around those challenges. Discovering your users’ solutions for problems can enable you to find answers you may have otherwise overlooked. The information gathered in this step will allow you to build new user-centric flows and address the pain points you’ve discovered.

Build the user stories.

Once you’ve created your personas and completed your user stories, it’s time to disseminate all that information down into repeated key elements. Was there a specific issue your users consistently brought up during their interviews? These pain points are a prime candidate for user stories.

You can build a narrative around the issue like:

“As a new user, I want to be able to sign up for an account without giving my credit card information.”

“I want to be able to check the balance on my credit card and pending charges quickly.”

From this information you can begin to understand the first user is concerned about giving out their financial information, so you might consider using a new user sign up without a credit card required for a trial period. The second user is frustrated at having to search for their balances and pending charges, so you may consider adding a dashboard your users land on when they sign into your website or app. Once you understand the pain points and you build solutions to address them, you’re able to start creating user flows

What is a user flow?

A user flow is a path the user will take on your website or app to accomplish a task. This flow will take the user from their entry point through the process step by step all the way to the completion of the task, such as making a purchase. Mapping out the tasks and solutions you’ve gathered in the earlier phases of your digital strategy allows you to build better user-centric websites and apps that for your users.

4. Information Architecture: Build the Foundation

Information architecture (IA) is a term that describes the blueprint or design structure of a project that enables user experience (UX) designers to generate wireframes and sitemaps. It focuses primarily on the organization and structure of the content, allowing for easy navigation. Good information architecture is a foundation for an efficient user experience, but not the other way around. UX designers and information architects are different roles that often get confused.

What is the difference between information architecture and user experience?

Information architects create content structures out of complex data sets, often conducted through persona research and flow diagrams. (It’s a plan coming together!)

User experience, on the other hand, works with emotion. We’re not talking, “Aww, puppies!” sentiment, but more of an emotional response to completing a task.

UX design adds context and story to a user’s behavior, giving them a lasting impression of the experience. Not only does the UX designer consider IA, but they also concern themself with how to engage users and design pleasant experiences.

What are the components of information architecture?

In order to establish a successful digital strategy, it’s vital to understand what goes into making solid IA. In their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, two well-known IA pioneers, have marked four main components as IA’s main structures.

They are:

• Organization systems
• Labeling systems
• Navigation systems
• Searching systems

Organization Systems

These are the groups or categories in which information is divided, helping users predict where they can easily find specific information. There are three main ways to organize this information: hierarchical, sequential, and matrix.

Hierarchical – This technique refers to the visual hierarchy of elements on a page in a way that the user can understand the importance of each component.

Sequential – This structure creates a path for the user to follow, usually in a series of steps. Sequential systems are most commonly used in e-commerce websites and apps.

Matrix – These structures can be a bit more complicated for users since they ultimately choose how they navigate the content. Users have various choices for content organization. For example, these items could be categorized by date, alphanumerically, or by topic.

Labeling Systems

Successful product design relies on simplicity at its core, and UX designers must take large amounts of information and create simple labels to relay the information without confusing users. Let’s consider that most websites have contact information like phone number, email address, and physical address accessed through a “contact” navigation label. The label “contact” acts as a trigger for users, associating the word with the contact information without displaying all the data in the navigation. Ultimately labeling systems aim at uniting data in the most digestible way possible for users.

Navigation Systems

Navigation, loosely defined, is a set of actions that guide users through a website or product. In terms of IA, the navigation system involves all the ways a user moves through the content. Examples of this include header and footer navigation.

Searching Systems

Information architecture uses this system to help users search for specific information or data within a website or app. Search features aid users most effectively when a site or app has a large amount of data that can be difficult to find.

There are ways to break down most of these systems further. These high-level definitions of different methods information architecture uses to incorporate data organization are an excellent start.

5. Content: More Than Just a Pretty Face

A beautifully designed website with animations and a unique design is a great way to attract new users, but great content is what keeps them on your site longer and more often.

Here are a few ways to write meaningful content for your site:

1. Make your copy scannable. Today’s users will scan your content looking for specific keywords and phrases.
2. Talk in layman’s terms. Try using terminology that your audience understands.
3. Talk to readers as you would a friend. Depending on your brand voice, this can be a little more difficult, but if a user can relate to your brand through your content, it’s a big win.
4. Understand your target audience. You’ve followed steps 1-4; you’ve got this!
5. Demonstrate proof that the CTA is worth it. Do this through testimonials, success stories, or partnerships—things that showcase your expertise and dispel customers’ doubts about your abilities.

SEO and You… and Google

It’s essential to focus on your audience when writing content, but you can’t forget the power of Google’s search engine. It can be a balancing act to optimize content for your audience and ensure that relevant keywords include titles, subheadings, and meta descriptions. Avoid “keyword stuffing,” which can lower your rankings with search engines. Industry experts suggest aiming for a 1-2% keyword density.

Here are a few other ways to optimize your content without compromising it:

1. Include keywords in headlines and sub-headers. Make sure your primary keywords have an H1 tag while other keywords are in your subheadings and body text.
2. Pay attention to metadata. Strong metadata contains one to two sentences that will encourage your users to click your link over theirs.
3. Utilize smart URLs. Help users understand what’s on the page with a descriptive URL.
4. Add links. Adding helpful and relevant links to other parts of your site will keep users on your site longer, affecting Google rankings.

There are several other ways to help optimize your content, like updating your content from time to time; so it’s fresh and re-indexed by Google or changing outdated banners or CTAs. You can even optimize internal linking if you post a new page or blog that corresponds to the content.

Develop a Successful Digital Strategy with WebDevStudios

Planning a digital strategy on your own can be daunting, but the good news is that WebDevStudios is here to help! We offer digital strategy with every project we do and can help you make your next project a success. After all, that’s our mission. Contact us today and let’s partner together to develop a successful digital strategy to meet your 2021 business goals.

The post 5 Tips for a Successful Digital Strategy in 2021 appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Today, we’ll talk about four pillars of focus for your website strategy:

• Defining your users
• Defining your user paths
• Defining your site structure
• Defining your content strategy

But first: what is a website strategy? In its most basic definition, a website strategy is the plan you’re following to achieve whatever goal it is you’ve set for yourself. Do you want to attract more visitors to your website? Do you want to increase users’ time on site? Do you want to sell more of a product or service on your website?

With a strategy in place, you can focus on actionable paths and items to achieve your wildest fantasies (okay, maybe they’re not all that wild). Having a strategy alone isn’t going to get you to where you need to be, though; you’re also going to need to execute on that strategy.

So, let’s begin with one of our four pillars to see just how we can begin building a strategy to execute.

Defining Your Users

Before you can think about what the goals are for your website, you need to think about the users for whom your site is built. Knowing your users, their goals, and how they use your website will guide you toward making decisions with them in mind, which helps you establish your website strategy.

Who is your current user base? How do they even use the website—on a phone, a tablet, or a computer?

If you’re selling a product or service, do you know who your customers are? Do they predominantly fall into a specific age group, and if so, are you tailoring your content to that age group?

If you don’t know the answers to questions like these, it’s time to dig into your analytics—whether those are specific to your website or, if you’re someone who sells a physical product or service in stores, extend to the real human people spending their time and money with you.

A helpful exercise to get the ball rolling is to define personas. A persona is a made-up representation of a person who uses, or may use, your site. Their behaviors and traits may be based in reality, but their names, photos, and personal details are generally a facsimile of their real-life counterparts.

You’ll want your personas to represent the users you either are already targeting and hope to retain or, possibly, new types of users who you are hoping to have walk through your virtual door.

Personas can be defined in several different ways: you can either utilize the existing data and analytics you have to establish your personas, or you can dive in a bit deeper and run interviews or focus groups with your existing user base. With the latter, you’ll be able to receive more real-world feedback, though not everybody will have the time and resources to run a focus group. Once your personas are defined, it’s time to figure out exactly how these users are supposed to work their ways through your website.

Defining Your User Paths

The moment you know your users and their needs, you can begin to map out the user paths. Defining your user paths is a massively important step of your website strategy. In fact, it should be done before beginning designs or even wireframes. You don’t want to just throw a hero there and a call to action there without thinking about whether or not those elements should even be on a page in the first place. A design process without fleshed out user flows runs the risk of turning out a scattered and confusing final product.

But, what is a user path? A user path, put succinctly, is the flow a user follows as they navigate your website. If your end goal is for a user to sign up for an email newsletter, how do they get from landing on your website to signing up for the newsletter? If your end goal is for a user to make a purchase, which path does the user follow to ensure they’re presented with all of the information they need to complete the transaction?

Based on your research, you should know the reasons your users are coming to your website. Whether it’s informational, to purchase products, to interact with a community, or any other number of reasons, your research should be able to tell you exactly who your users are and how they use your website.

That isn’t all you’ll want to know, though. As much as you need to serve the needs of your users on your website, you also need to serve the needs of your business. Don’t get so tied up in defining all of your user needs that you forget your own business needs.

You may have a new product or service launching that you’re going to want to push users towards, or you may be pivoting away from one aspect of your business to another. Without negatively affecting the experience for your existing users, you may need to focus on how to drive your own objectives; and these may be different from anything your users have talked about during your research phase.

It’s also important to consider brand new users. Your business objectives may be easy to communicate to the users you’ve had for years, but how will you communicate your objectives and goals to someone who is seeing your website for the first time? How will you educate, inform, and lead these brand new users so that they can follow the correct path to find what they need?

Another important factor to consider with brand new users is the way they got to your site in the first place. Did they see a promoted post on social media? Did they click on a paid ad somewhere else online? Did they find your site through an organic search?

The way users get to your site is important, as well, and may need to be tailored for each medium. For a user who finds your site through an organic search, the homepage may not be the first page they land on. Instead, they may see a single product page. For a promoted social media post or paid advertisement, you may want to send users to a landing page specific to the content of the ad rather than pushing them to the homepage without any guardrails. If your aim is to convert users to signups or purchases, you’ll want to ensure that you’re doing everything in your power to guide them to the correct spots from the very beginning.

The important thing to remember is to guide your users, whoever they are and however they reach your site, to meet two sets of goals: yours and theirs. Along the way, though, you need your website to act as a guide to get the user exactly where they need to be. You don’t want to push a newsletter signup or product purchase call to action too quickly. You’ll want to make sure the user has been provided with the proper information flow so that they can make an informed decision once they land at the final step of their intended user flow.

Defining Your Site Structure

So, now that you’ve got your user paths mapped out, it’s time to move on to thinking about your site structure. A decent amount of this work may be done for you already. If you already have a website, you should have a solid starting point. You may already know the pages and relationships you want to keep while identifying other pages that are low performers and can either be completely axed or swallowed up into other pages.

Another chunk of this work is going to be laid out by way of your work on user paths. By defining the paths you want your various users to follow, you’re going to essentially be creating something akin to a sitemap or flow chart of pages and content.

Don’t stop there, though. It’s great to have an understanding of your heavy hitters like your homepage, landing pages, and product pages. What about everything else, though? Are you going to be producing regular content with blog posts? Will you publish case studies, press releases, or other forms of content?

If so, where will this content live and how will a user find it? How will your various types of content interact with one another to bring the user along for the ride? If part of one of your user paths is to show a user a portfolio of your previous work, how are you going to drive them to that portfolio?

You’ll also want to think about when it’s important to show a user specific types of content. If you’re selling a product or service that lends itself to a portfolio page, you may want to bring the user to your portfolio page before driving them to product pages. If your goal is to educate users before leading them to a contact form, how will you structure the content so users can be sure they’ve exhausted their research before filling out a contact form?

Site and content structure are not just where the pages and posts live throughout your site, though. You’re going to want to think about how the content is laid out on individual pages, too. When a user comes to a landing page, especially if it’s their first time on the site, you’ll want them to feel like the content makes sense and provides them with enough information to make an informed decision as to where to go next.

Again, as with your user paths, don’t simply slap content into a website or even a single page without thinking through what that content actually means, what it says to a user, and how it guides them to meet their goals.

Defining Your Content Strategy

You know your users. You know how you want your users to use your site. You know how you’re going to arrange and structure the content on your site.

The last piece of the website strategy puzzle is to define your content strategy. By this point, you should know what types of content you’re going to be producing: blog posts, case studies, data visualizations, etc. So now it’s time to think about how, and for whom, that content is going to be produced.

Have you decided to write blog posts for your site? Great! Have you decided who these blog posts are for? Have you settled on a tone or style for these blog posts? Maybe not?

Having an additional content stream outside of landing pages and product listings is a wonderful way to bring users back to your site. While most of your content may be generally static and unchanging, blog posts could be published several times a week. Before you begin writing these posts, though, you need to nail down your audience and writing style.

Are you writing blog posts for users who have never heard of your products or services before? Will these posts be used as a means to educate folks on individual parts of your business before driving them to another part of your site? Will you only publish news and general company information? What about tutorials or real-life testimonials from customers who have used your products or services in the past?

If you’re going to be talking to your audience, how will you talk to them? Are “we” going to be doing something in these blog posts? Am “I” telling you how I’ve done something? Or am I telling “you” what to do and how to do it through a tutorial or educational post?

Keeping a consistent voice, tone, and style in your blog is going to be important so that your users know why they’re coming to your blog in the first place. Of course, you can have different categories of posts for different tones or purposes, but it’s important to know that upfront and to be able to drive users to those specific posts so that they don’t have to hunt and scavenge through your site to find their desired content.

Finally, don’t forget to nail down who is going to be writing your content. Are you a one-person shop running a small business? If so, can you realistically keep up with a steady stream of one or two blog posts a week? If you think you might run out of steam after a few months leaving an abandoned graveyard of decaying blog posts, then it might be beneficial to seek out a dedicated content person or team.

The content doesn’t end once a user leaves your website, either. You may find yourself needing videos, tweets, and stories produced and not enough time to produce them all yourself. Before you get in over your head and dedicate yourself to producing a high volume and/or high quality of content, make sure your plan is sustainable.

Wrapping Up

This is, by no means, an exhaustive list of all of the things you need to think about and do when planning your website strategy. This is just the start of your journey!

What may be the most important piece of the puzzle to remember is this: not every website strategy is going to be the same. The process is going to be different and hold unique challenges for every website and project. You can’t apply a blanket set of rules to every website strategy project, but you can have a set of touchstones to point you in the right directions.

As long as you are thoughtful, listen to the demands and requirements of the project, and tailor your process and deliverables to each site, project, or client then you’ll find the overall rhythm that works for you while still providing an exceptional and distinct end product. When you’re ready to discuss and build your website strategy, contact us. Let’s work together to define your course of action.

The post Improve Your Website Strategy Now appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Sixty-eight percent of consumers say COVID-19 elevated their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.

–Social Media Today

If you are not focusing on a website strategy for meeting the expectations of 68% of consumers, you’re missing a huge opportunity. To get you there, we want to help you get clear on your goals and make sure you are putting your best foot forward in this digital world.

Let’s go over what you might consider in your website strategy for 2021.

What are your goals?

The first and most important thing to consider are your goals. It’s important to think about your business goals at a high level to start and not just your website goals (we’ll get to those, too).

• Has your business been required to shift this past year?
• Were you a brick and mortar that suddenly found themselves doing 100% of business online?
• Are you selling products, services, or both?

It’s important to get really clear about the ‘what’ here so that you have your north star that will help drive decisions as you work through your website strategy.

Some examples could be:

• Drive more sales to a specific sector of your business
• Build a more targeted email list
• Allow previously face-to-face services to become digital

Why are you setting this goal?

Having goals is great, but without a backing ‘why,’ you’ll have a harder time staying the course and hitting those goals. Sometimes the ‘why’ can take some work to get to but you really should take the time to get there.

Let’s say you’re a marketing manager at your company, and your boss comes to you and says, “Our goal for 2021 is to update the website!”

Okay… that’s great and all, but why? “It’s time and something we should have already done before.”

Hmm… but why? “We are not getting enough leads.”

Why not? “We’ve had to move from in person sales to digital sales and we’re not showing up on Google when people search for our services.”

Now we have an idea of what’s going on!

Leads that were coming from face-to-face business meetings because sales people were flying all over are no longer coming in. The website is not optimized for search engines, so it’s not showing up. Our goal is now to update the website, making sure it’s SEO optimized and things are in place to capture leads. Dig in and ask why as many times as you can until there are no more answers.

How do you plan on reaching these goals?

This is where the fun part begins. We’ve done the hard work of creating the goal and stating the why; now let’s figure out how to pull it off, specifically with your website.

• What do you need to reach your goal?
• Will it require updated branding guidelines?
• What third-party services might be helpful?
• Do you need to take payments online?
• Will people be booking to your calendar from the website?
• Is there some business process automation that could be helpful?
• Do we need to create something custom?

It’s important to list out all of the needs of your website strategy up front so that we can plan how all of those things will work together.

What does the outcome of a great website strategy include?

A great website strategy team will work with you to ensure that all of your ducks are in a row before you begin the project. This will allow the team(s) doing the set up, building, and integrations to have a clear vision of what the expectations are.

Here are a few things you would see:

• Project overview and timeline
• Branding guidelines
• User personas
• User paths or journeys
• Design mockups
• Technical and/or functionality details
• Level of effort
• Resource or people Requirements

Some of these may be items that you or your company have already prepared, or they may be things you need help piecing together. Having all of these packaged together will greatly increase the likelihood of a team knowing what success looks like for building or updating your website, and when you’re ready to work with a team to get you there, contact us!

The post Plan a Website Strategy to Meet Your 2021 Goals appeared first on WebDevStudios.