For impressive results, your website needs to counter and beat two powerful forces working against you:
1 People’s Skepticism
People have become skeptical because of fake promises they endured—things not delivered as promised. They felt betrayed, and started doubting everything.
2 Boundless Competition
Boundless competition leads to unlimited options for people to choose from. To deals with enormous choices, they filter, and they do it fast. You hardly get fraction of their attention and time—if at all.
To beat these two forces, your website must be sensible in every respect. First, it should be professional and authentic. It must appeal to people; have a personality and consistency rooted in it. Every piece of it should be serving a purpose—nothing unnecessary. It must then engage people, make them understand things fast, and influence them, and leave a mark on their mind.
Only by doing the best in everything that matters, we earn the right to expect massive returns.
Delivering the best experience throughout people’s journey on your website can bring outstanding results for your business.— Paras Ralhan
Design
Before diving to design pages for your website, I visit and analyse many of your competitors’ websites, read and listen about your industry, go through the content you provide etc. The understanding I get guide me to take wise and thoughtful decisions that keep me on the right track.
While researching, I also collect material I find interesting.
Design should always be based on content. That’s why I stay away from pre-build templates. Finding a template that could best present the content at hand is hugely time intensive—not worth the effort.
The understanding I got while researching, the material I collected, along with my knowledge and experience all work together to create designs that would possibly present your content in most sensible and influential way to your audience.
Websites, like people, have personalities. Website’s personality, in some way, should be in line with the industry it belongs to. Personality is reflected through the choice of colors, fonts, images, icons, along with language and tone it speaks in to its audience.
Development
I do both front and backend development. Frontend development connect directly to your audience. How a site behaves when people interact with it is handled by Frontend Development. Smooth and elegant behaviour that is in line with the personality of the site will add another level of sophistication found only in high-profile websites. Moreover, it allows us to manage large amount of content in limited space—helping people focus and consume it easily.
The behaviour of the site should remain consistent in all major browsers. I’ll ensure it by testing it thoroughly.
Backend development doesn’t directly affect your audience, but it matters. It sets the foundation on which everything else rests. A concise, clean, and well-written code that is easily maintainable and scalable helps me keep things in control and empower me to handle any future requirements not yet known. The code, although invisible, if not handled carefully, can cost you a fortune.
I always advise my clients that whenever possible, resist using third-party software—in WordPress, we call them plugins. Their easy availability and easy integration is tempting, but they come at a cost. Increasing dependence on them can anytime deter smooth functioning of your website.
On Site SEO
“Write for people, not for machines,” is the best SEO advice offered by Google. Purpose is not just to come on top in search results for certain key phrases, but to stay their permanently. This is possible only if people find your content interesting, engaging, and valuable.
More authority you have in a particular field, more you write about it, and more clarity and value it provides to people. Then they engage, share, recommend, and link to your site way more than they do this for your competitors.
Search engines are much smarter now and can’t easily be tricked by manipulations. Yes, there are things within our control, but there exists no replacement for real, authentic, unique, authoritative, and engaging content. It must be created, and in large amounts.
What I’ll help you is to find some key phrases that are important to your business, and enough people are also searching for them. Then you need to write much and valuable content around these phrases. Your content must involve these phrases, and variation of these phrases in sufficient amount. Everything you write must feel natural to your audience, otherwise it won’t work.
Content Writing & Editing
I occasionally write complete content for my clients. The reason is, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to attain the depth in their field from where real and authentic writing originates. I always push them to write as good as they can.
Most often, I refine and edit their content. I first understand the intent, then try hard to make it compelling and impactful. I assess every paragraph, every sentence, and every against usefulness, purpose, and clarity. Anything unnecessary is ruthlessly removed.
Your audience must identify with what you say. There must be a convincing logic to it—that they can observe and verify. If they find anything out of touch with reality, you won’t get another chance to win them back.
Website Speed Optimization
People hate to wait. If your website is slow, people will leave before it even gets a chance to impress them. They have unlimited choices that are also just a click away. Few seconds is what at most they wait for. Your website should open well before they start losing their patience.
Website loading speed depends on many technical factors such as hosting plan, website traffic, server location distance, cache, number of requests, media sizes, page size, etc.
I do many things to make your site as fast as possible. Reduce image sizes, compressing videos, streaming videos instead of loading all at once, lazy loading images (downloading only when they come in front), using SVGs (very lightweight) wherever possible, combining scripts, using browser and server cache capabilities, upgrading server if need arises and much more.
I also guide my clients about what not to do while managing their website’s content on their own. Server should remain as light as possible—nothing needless and heavy should occupy its space. It’s our combined effort that will keep your site running fast years on end.
