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Have you noticed how many themes and plugins are available for WordPress these days? It can be a challenge to find the ideal theme and plugins for your website. I don’t know any way to find out how many WordPress themes and plugins actually exist, but it’s easy to see how many sites deal with these, at least enough to come up in a search. So, a couple of days ago I put “WordPress plugins” into Google (without quotes) and it came back with 639 million results. When I put “WordPress Themes” into Google it said there were 1,100,000,000 results related to that search phrase. No, that’s not a typo – two 1’s followed by EIGHT zeros. One billion, one hundred million. That’s a lot. But wait…
I checked again two days later, and it had gone up another 60 million! In just two days! The search result now showed 1,160,000,000.
Now, remember, this is not a count of how many themes there are. It’s a count of how many websites and web pages are involved with the theme market. They may just be talking about WordPress themes, or reviewing them, or offering some for download. Some may be selling them. Theme Forrest on Envato Markets alone has over 11,000 themes available. Why has this market gotten so active? Why has this become such a big market?
Well, good site design is extremely important if your “brand” is going to compete successfully in your particular niche. This means that you need to arrange your website to be easy to navigate, easy to read, and have a great design. That’s part of the function of themes.
With a high-quality theme for WordPress, you get the benefit of a designer’s vision. Make sure to find a theme that fits your product or niche. When you look at a picture of a theme on a site that sells themes, you are seeing the designer’s vision of a well-laid out, well-designed WordPress site.
An unattractive, messy or unorganized site can negatively impact your business. So find a good theme. A theme that fits your website and its topic and which you can work with. Do some research in your niche by going to successful websites and see what kind of layout they are using. You may not be able to tell what theme they use, but you can get a good idea of their design goals.
Here are some suggestions:
Brand Your Website
Your website should highlight the look and feel of your brand’s image. Remember, consistency across all the platforms you use in your marketing is one of the main keys to a successful brand. This means that you need to feature your logo as well as other creative elements of your brand. By doing this, your clients will already have a clear mental image of the kind of content they’re going to find on your website.
However, you need to be careful about design, colors, and fonts. Some colors and fonts will make it hard for visitors to read your content. As you can imagine, that is not good for business. It is always best to err on the side of caution and not to be too fussy. A modern or minimalistic look is sure to please almost any crowd.
Easy Navigation
Complicated websites are a thing of the past. Gone are the days when people had the time to click from page to page to find what they want to know. If the information they want is not readily available, your visitors are just going to find the information they want elsewhere. Plan your website pages and posts before you start building your website. Also, make sure you use navigation titles that are accurate.
Visitors should have a pretty good idea of what to expect on a specific page before they click on its link. It also wouldn’t hurt to include a search feature. That makes it easy for clients to locate the exact content they need. Sitemaps are also a really good idea. Google likes them.
Mobile Friendly
Always remember that everybody’s busy these days and always on the move. That means your target audience is likely to use their phones to visit your website at times. This has far greater consequences on your brand than you may think. Many consumers will not revisit a website that is not mobile-friendly or “responsive”. And it’s believed that Google ranks mobile-friendly, responsive sites better than non-friendly sites. And these days there’s no reason for your site not to be mobile-friendly.
If your site is built with HTML and it’s not already responsive, it can be made mobile-friendly with CSS. Of course, if you use WordPress it’s a simple matter of choosing a responsive theme. A responsive WordPress theme will automatically adjust the maximum width of your images. You can set preferred widths for individual web pages in their mobile version and even adjust the sidebar. A lot of these types of themes will take your sidebar and stack its elements and put them in a hidden menu that expands when you click the three-line icon, aka hamburger menu.
If you want to see what it takes to convert a fixed-width HTML site to a mobile-friendly site, take a look at this article at Instructables.com
Regularly Update Content
Your website will not promote your brand very well if it features content that’s no longer relevant. Whether it’s references to past promotions that are no longer active or products or services that you no longer offer. I can’t tell you how much content I come across that contains references to Squidoo lenses or Google+. Irrelevant content is one of the biggest nuisances of online marketing.
This sort of material will give your visitors and customers the impression that if you don’t care enough to keep your material up to date you probably won’t care about how your actions will affect them. This, of course, will be very bad for business. The content you post should always be relevant and consistent. If it gets out of date, take it down, update it, or mark it as out of date and archive it.
Ask for Feedback
In this age of social media and instant text messaging, communication with your customers, prospects, and subscribers should always be two-way. You should find creative ways to ask for feedback from your customers. This is a great way to improve your presence and find out about problems you wouldn’t know about otherwise. It is always good to make your clients feel their opinions can influence your product offerings and their overall customer experience. This also means that you have to make it easy for your clients to contact you or request information. Always remember to thank your clients for their opinions. A brand that cares will be a brand that sells.
Subscriptions
No matter how good your content is, how great your site graphics are, or how fantastic your logo is, you can’t assume that visitors will come back to your page over and over. They might, but you can’t assume they will. You need to encourage your visitors to subscribe so that you can reach out to them when you post new promotions or new content. Being able to send your message directly to their inbox is an opportunity you shouldn’t allow yourself to miss out on. Please, however, be careful not to do so too often since your visitors may consider this to be overwhelming and possibly even irritating.
‘Til next time,
Dave
Owner/President of DUH Web Media Group
Sites:
DUHWebMediaGroup.com
DUHWebMarketingInsight.com
DUHWebMarketingReviews.com
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