I ‘discovered’ Dustin Hartzler on iTunes earlier this year while I was looking for a WordPress podcast that kept to topic and didn’t waste my time with a lot of chatter. I won’t mention the names of the podcasts I had to delete because of too little content, but I can highly recommend Dustin’s Your Website Engineer podcast if you want to learn about WordPress in an easy-to-understand manner. He has a call-in line if you want to call with a question and of course he’s got twitter and email for questions you might have—and he answers them too! Dustin is starting monthly webinars and this morning’s webinar was about how to make your website stand out from the crowd. Here are some of my take-aways.
5 Tips To Make Your Website Better
- Know the purpose of your website and then organize it to highlight your purpose. This is commonly referred to as a ‘call to action’. When someone comes to your site, what do you want them to do? Prominently display this above the fold with perhaps a button or some other illustration to make it easy for your visitor.Do you want them to read a particular article, sign up on your mailing list or perhaps visit your Facebook page and like it? Tell them, don’t be shy.
- Make your site easy to navigate. Can your visitors always ‘go home’ by clicking your logo or the ‘Home’ button? The order of your navigation should be: Home – About—Services—Blog—Contact.
- The ‘About’ page is the second most visited on your site. I know it is on mine (checked my analytics). Make it interesting, not stuffy. Here’s where you should show your personality and talk about how you can help them. Even though it’s your about me page, you need to make it about your visitors! Since it is the second most visited page, go ahead and put ways to contact you there and perhaps showcase your top blog posts on this page. Don’t make it too cluttered though.
- Use white space. It’s refreshing to see white space on sites instead of so much jammed into one page. My site definitely needs some minimalizing!
- Your Contact page is another important page. Make sure to list, in an eye-appealing way, all the ways you can be contacted. Some like to tweet, some like email, some want to leave a message. Put all of your social media personas here and let your visitor/reader choose.
These are the main points and comprise the notes I took from his hour-long webinar. If you are a student of WordPress, I’d go sign up for his newsletter and his podcast to stay informed.
Here is how Dustin has his Home page organized. I think we can all see what to do when coming here!
Try AboutMe.com as an On-line Business Card
I heard of this site just a few months ago. It can function as a business card. It’s easy for people to remember aboutme.com/yourname. Go there and sign up for a free account and then build your profile with all of your social media profiles. It’s very visual as they allow a huge photo to be uploaded for your background. You can see how I’ve used it here.
I wrote on my whiteboard months ago under my long-term goals that I need to update my website. This webinar has given me some good ideas and best practices. I’ve been wanting to move from the iThemes Flexx theme over to Builder for some time now. I think the time has come!
Let me know what you think of these tips and if you have anything to add.