I started designing websites around 7 years ago and during this time I have discovered some great tips to make your site successful.
1. Site Purpose
Most websites that never fully take off have no real purpose they are designed with multiple ideas in mind.
Because of this parts of the site never get finished or are done poorly, so its best to create a website with one central purpose and after it has been successful in attracting users think of other ideas that will keep them coming back.
2. Use Your Own Code
This is one of the most important tips I can give for making a successful website. Even if you dont code the entire site try to customize it and make it unique to others, people dont like visiting multiple websites that look the same with slightly varying content and using your own code gives you full control of how the site looks and works.
3. Clean Design
A clean and easy to use design is an essential step towards having a successful website. Simple things from choosing a good colour scheme to easy to read fonts can make a huge impact on how easy it is to navigate and read your site.
4. SEO Is Your Friend
SEO is an important step for increasing the amount of traffic you receive from search engines.
Now you have a great looking website all that's missing is visitors, so how do you get search engine traffic?
Your page title is your friend, I would say this is the most important part of SEO because its what people are going to see first in the search results as well as this its what the search engine looks for first when deciding your site's search terms.
Meta Tags can be important for setting a site description and keywords for the search engine to use so remember to include them.
The hardest step in SEO is getting good backlinks so search engines will rank your site higher than others, always remember that backlinks to sites that relate to your own are of greater value than ones that have little to do with your sites content.
5. Feedback
Feedback is very important, it allows you to improve your site in ways you might of never have thought. Always include a contact address on your website for queries and feedback and remember the easier it is for people to give you feedback the more feedback you will receive.
6. Website Updates
Website updates are important for keeping your visitors coming back. Refer to the feedback you receive for your site when doing updates and try to add new content once in a while the more often the better.
