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Health & Fitness

Six Features Your Website Design Must Have in 2013

Lou Leonardis, Creative Director at Enzo Creative in Summit, offers tips for how to improve your website design in 2013.

If you’re thinking about a website redesign or how you can improve your website design in 2013, keep reading.

I’m going to give you a brief overview of 6 features your website should have so it does not look it was designed in 2003 (even if it was). Some of the design elements are easier to implement than others and expect some of these great website features to require a level of commitment. They’ll be worth it!

Video

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Not everyone wants to read through all of your carefully crafted, perfectly written website text. Video allows you to share your message in a medium that many prefer. The content in a video is recalled 5 times more than that of written content. Plus, did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world? Amateur web video is readily accepted on the web but pay attention to the quality of your audio. You can purchase an inexpensive microphone and adapter to record directly to your iPhone! It’s pretty easy and you should certainly get more video on your website ASAP.

Feeds

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Feeds aggregate content from external sources and can present new content to your website on the fly. Facebook and Twitter feeds are pretty common these days and are great to have on your site if you are active in these social media arenas. Also, Google offers a plethora of feeds that can enhance just about any website. You can have news, financial data and even photos automatically delivered around the clock to your website.

Social Sharing

Facebook has 1 BILLION active users, Twitter has hundreds of millions of active users and even Google+ has more than 100 million active users. The simplest way to get in front of all of them is to include a social sharing plugin on your website and encourage your visitors to share, like and recommend your content. You can decide which social media icons to include and many formats already exist making it easy to match the style of your website design. Check out an article I wrote titled “Is Your Website Designed for Sharing in Social Media?” to see what I’m talking about.

Contact Info

This might sound like an obvious one but make sure all phone numbers, email and address contact information are readily visible on every page. Consider placing it at the top of your website design making it easy for a prospect to connect with you.

Responsive

Ahhhhhhh. Responsive web design, responsive web design, responsive web design. A responsive website design adapts its layout depending on the device it is being viewed on to ensure easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling. Retail businesses are prime candidates for having a responsive website. You should seriously consider redesigning to this format as the number of people using tablets and mobile devices as their primary way of accessing the web increases every day, as 61% of mobile users will not return to a website that is not optimized for their devices.

Blog

Blogging is a commitment worth making. Publishing to your website at least once per week will greatly help your authority on the web and increase the chances you’ll end up on the first pages of Google search results. Most importantly on a blog, the content needs to be valuable to your customers and prospects. If you’re still paying for print ads and don’t have a blog on your website, switch up your budget so a blog is implemented ASAP.

If you have any questions on implementing any of the features listed above to your website design, reach out to me at (908) 219-4703 or complete the Enzo Creative contact form here.

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