When you want to start a blog or an online business, your biggest obstacle is probably your limited knowledge of website creation. Thankfully, there’s WordPress, Wix, and other free platforms available where you can build a presentable website without much work. However, you can’t drive enough traffic without making significant tweaks.
You may not need to take up a course in web design, but a basic understanding of it, along with SEO and other traffic-driving strategies, will take you a long way. The best part is, you don’t necessarily have to spend money. There are free resources you can utilize to make your dull, boring template a unique and appealing one.
Without further ado, here are some DIY tricks to improve your website:
1. Learn How to Take and Edit Photos Like a Pro
Whether you sell products or not, your website will benefit from a set of professional-quality photos. Fortunately, most smartphones today are equipped with a decent camera. By just having a high-quality model, you can take a lot of Instagrammable photos and film vlogs. Different photography and video-editing apps are also available for free, so you can already have the tools you need to enhance your shots instantly.
If you’re only posting product or service reviews, you can send the photos or videos to your website straight from your phone. Your blog’s viewers aren’t likely looking for professionally-taken media, anyway, since a review is supposed to be a “raw” content from an ordinary consumer. So unless you’ve been paid by a company to do a review, then your unedited media will be enough.
But if you’re selling products, then that’s a different story. Your buyers would expect professionally-taken photos. However, since you’re only a beginner, a pro photographer’s fee is probably beyond your budget.
Hence, learn how to take product photos like a pro. Just buy a few necessary tools, such as a white background, a light tent, and a tripod. The natural light will be your lighting equipment.
Take multiple photos from all angles. Ensure that the products are spotlessly clean, without your fingerprints and all. Once you’ve gathered all the shots, edit them on your desired app, or avail of an e-commerce photo retouching service. They’ll save you a lot of trouble from potential editing mistakes!
2. Choose an Appealing Theme or Customize One
Website-building platforms have plenty of themes you can use for free. But it can be hard to choose one if there’s a myriad of options.
Narrow down your picks by considering color palettes, font faces, font sizes, pages, navigation, action buttons, and user-friendliness. It’s advisable to stick to a limited color palette to avoid overwhelming your audience. As for the font face and size, choose legible ones in a readable size to make your texts pop.
Don’t put all your content on a single page; make separate pages to implement organization. That is especially important for e-commerce sites because your buyers want to find the product they’re looking for easily. And a cluttered, disorganized site will make that difficult for them.
But your pages won’t be accessible without proper navigation. Hence, don’t forget to set appropriate labels and links to your pages, so that your web visitors won’t feel lost. For e-commerce sites, include “Products” on your navigation, breaking them down into different categories to narrow down a search.
Action buttons are also a must-have. They are the links that usually say “Log in,” or “Sign up,” or “Contact Us.” Without them, your site may look illegitimate.
Lastly, user-friendliness is what makes your site easy to access and explore. You should choose a mobile-friendly theme for the benefit of smartphone users. Your website should look equally good on a computer and a smartphone’s screen.
3. DIY Your SEO Strategies
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is usually a service provided by digital marketing agencies. But since they cost a lot of money, it would help learn a few bits of it yourself.
Start by looking at your existing data. The category page of an e-commerce site usually drives the most traffic, so improve the title tags of your product pages to drive traffic to it as well. If you’re selling makeup, add the specific names of the products to your titles, so that when someone searches for “lipstick + your site,” for example, then they’ll be taken straight into your Lipsticks page.
Master keyword research, as well. It’s probably the most important SEO strategy. Find out the exact keywords used by your market, using Google Keyword Planner or anything similar to help you with your research.
Using these tricks on your website, you’ll gain considerable traffic in no time and potentially garner high sales early into your launching. But don’t stop at these three; keep learning new tricks and techniques, and you’d maintain your favorable standing in search engine results pages.
