Thousands of websites are created every day and each one of them is pretty much distinguished. They differ in design, topics or content, targeted audience, purpose (spreading news, making money,etc).
There are also quite a lot of things that websites differ in, that users or visitors do not necessarily see, such as website traffic, rankings, user engagement and satisfaction with the content, etc. After all, there is one common thing that almost all websites and blogs strive to achieve. And that's a community of loyal readers and active visitors. Because if your posts and content go unread it isn’t worth a single penny.
But how on earth, we are supposed to create a website that people will actually love and find worth spending time on? Well, that’s rather a complicated question, but the good news is that it's absolutely achievable!
Below I offer straight-to-the-point tips and solutions backed by research and my personal experience, that will help you to create a WordPress blog/website your visitors will love. I’ll also suggest some plugins that can be used for achieving faster and better results.
Create a Popular WordPress Website
Identify Your Audience
First and foremost, make it clear who you are writing for and who your reader is. If you identify who your readers are from the outset, it will get much more easier for you to better serve them and create a website that will meet their needs.
Do a thorough analysis of what type of content or topics they are interested in, what time of the day/week they are most active, which of your posts they give most attention to, which headlines or topics engage them better, etc. You can use these valuable facts to make it a place where your readers will constantly refer to and find it worth spending time on.
Give Your Website Design Careful Thought
Design or layout is one of the most important aspects of a website. Simple and straightforward design makes it easy to navigate across a website and provides better user experience. I always tend to include website functionality in its design as well, as I do think they are strongly connected. I mean there are a lot more things that go into website design apart from the colors, sections, style elements. Website functionality is also a part of it.
For a modern and functional website design I would recommend checking out WordPress Business Elite theme. It’s an advanced one page WordPress theme with a beautiful one page layout featuring a slider and a fixed menu at the top.
The theme provides several sections to showcase your content in a visually distinguishable way and helps your visitors to get around on your website with ease. There are also 10 page templates available, 30 pre-installed fonts, 6 customizable layouts, and a contact form on the homepage. Although the theme targets primarily business and corporate websites, its modern design and advanced features can be well used for other purposes as well.
Create Genuine, Worth-Reading, Valuable Content
For me, content and website design are strictly interrelated. Without good website design nobody would ever like to read the content that’s inside it, even if it’s worth giving a read. And vice verse. If the content you provide is outdated, copy pasted from somewhere else, or doesn’t match your website topic, even the coolest website design will not save your life.
The tip here is to provide valuable content in a timely manner, that you know your readers will be interested to read.
Go Visual
Visuals are doing a great job in driving attention. They are also good at increasing user retention and growing engagement. Not only do statistics show that visual content generates more views and engagement, but it’s proved that 90% of the information that comes to our brain is visual. Moreover, brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text. So, why not? Take advantage of your visual content and make the most of it!
There are a lot of WordPress tools that are focused on images and visual content and are aimed at providing smooth viewing experience to users. Among them, Photo Gallery plugin is certainly distinguished, not only with quality and powerful features, but with the beautiful views and customization options as well. This WordPress gallery plugin enables you to add and edit images for different views and combine them into galleries and albums for better organization.
Its Masonry, Thumbnails, Mosaic, Blog style view options attract a lot of attention and can be customized to fit your specific needs. The galleries can contain both images and videos and they can be viewed as a slideshow in the lightbox with 15 transition effects.
The plugin also supports commenting possibility with 3 types of Captcha protection, Instagram integration, social sharing and many other advanced options necessary to best display your galleries and albums. It’s the best option to go with, if you want to showcase your visual content at its best. Your website visitors are going to love it.
Keep the Important Things “Above the Scroll”
Prioritizing is so important. It’s not possible to capture everything on one page at once,so make sure you show your most important content/posts/events/services/contacts up front. This strategy works great for your visitors as well. Instead of going back and forth on a page, they will be able to find the important highlights faster and with much ease.
Try To Get Subscriptions
I know that when you create a website every single visitor counts. But one-time visitors are not changing the game in the long run. What you need to make your blog work and generate a stable visitor base is to obtain regular readers and keep them coming back. Website subscriptions are a great way for growing its traffic and readership.
One of the best tools that will help you convert visitors into subscribers is OptinMonster plugin. It helps you to create beautiful and proven to convert opt-in forms which are able to detect user behavior. There are multiple types of forms available, such as floating bars, slide-ins, lightbox pop-ups and they are all open to complete customization. The plugin also offers built-in analytics to see which of your opt-ins works for you best.
Create Compelling Headlines
Headlines are the first things that strike our attention on a page. Before diving deep into the content it’s the headlines that give us a clue of what the text is going to be about and define our further actions. Make sure to provide obvious, compelling and concise headlines for your posts, and let your readers know up front whether your content/product/service is exactly what they’re looking for.
If you’re looking for some guidance on how to create catchy headlines for your posts, check out this article by Jeff Goins.
Mind Your Site Speed
We live in an era where every single second counts and people just don’t have any spare time to waste waiting for a website to load. The impact that the loading speed has on your visitors’ satisfaction and experience on your website is huge and in case of slow speed, it’s even harmful. Don’t leave your visitors with the feeling of frustration and take your site’s speed very seriously.
You can ensure the fast loading of your website by using caching plugins such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
Be Generous
Everything needs a payback. As your visitors are the ones who fuel the work of your website, giving them something back is a great way to show that you actually care about them.
You can share useful tips and tricks, or offer a free trial of a product/service, create an event/gathering for your visitors, create contest/competitions, give something away for free, etc.
Conclusion
These tips may seem minor things but they do have a great effect on your website. Once you put some time and energy to understand your audience and its needs , you’ll be able to better serve them and build a website that they would definitely love to spend time on.
Remember to make your readers and visitors your first priority and they will eventually pay you off. The results will not make you wait for long!
from Onextrapixel – Web Design and Development Online Magazine http://ift.tt/1sQ5r7S
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