Optimizing Your Website

Hello Everybody,

This week we learned about optimizing our websites. Optimizing means perfecting your website and making it as efficient as possible. This is an important step in order to attract potential customers. The goal for optimizing your website is to deliver the best results possible. By doing this, hopefully, you'll be attractive not only to searchers but also to search engines.  Searchers are the people who you want to convince to buy your product.  Searchers are people that are searching the internet in order to accomplish a goal or need. But you also need to optimize for the search engines.  The most used search engine would be Google. Search engines crawl content in order to bring the searchers the most relevant websites for their searchers.

Hubspot lists two ways to optimize your website. The first is to have a goal in mind for what you want your website to be able to accomplish.  Know what you want. The second is to make sure your website is easy to understand and crawl. In order to accomplish this you need to focus of three main parts: design, content topics/keywords and formatting of content. If you don't do well on these three parts, your website is going to be too confusing and deter people away. For example, my old college had a very difficult website to navigate.

It is understandable that college websites are more complex because they typically have a lot of information they need to jam into a small space. And honestly I can tell you some of my best college experiences were at Rock Valley College, it is a terrific school. But I can't tell you how many times I had difficultly navigating there website trying to find simple answers. Their text is either small or smaller, and the drop down menus have so many options no one wants to take the time to read it. For a website to have a good design it needs great cognitive fluency, simple navigation, relevant color scheme and streamlined next steps readily available.

A website gets judged between 1/50th-1/20th of a second. Make sure you're showing something worth seeing.

Until next week,
Caitlin Campbell