Evolving Technology & Website Tips & Tricks

The way in which people engage with brands has changed massively in recent times. But the question is, in a highly-competitive environment where every company has a website and some sort of online presence, how can you stand out? In this blog, we’ll present some basic website hints and tips, but also some more advanced features...  

Greater accessibility to the internet and, more recently, smartphone technology has seen online transactions soar, often at the expense of shops on the high street. Greater choice, efficiency, and being able to shop from the comfort of your sofa are all very appealing factors for consumers. For example, in the travel sector, an astonishing 76% of people book their holiday online! Here are some tips on how to engage users...

• It is critical that your website is responsive – this means that it will automatically adjust to the user’s device, providing them with a seamless experience whether they’re on an iPad, iPhone or desktop
• Call to actions help to encourage specific behaviours, for example colourful buttons with hover effects could be used to encourage the user to “Get in Touch” with you
• A variety of different content including video, audio, photography, blog posts, infographics will help to attract attention and engage your audience
• Your content needs to be fresh and engaging: Photography works really-well with concise, compelling text
• Navigation needs to be simple - a user’s journey through the website should be intuitive, you don’t want them to associate the feeling of frustration with your brand
• If you are selling products or services, you should be providing users with the functionality to make payments efficiently and securely
• Furthermore, if you’re selling, you will need a system capable of updating availability of products

One clever way in which technology is used to entice customers is personalisation. Personalisation is a technique whereby a website dynamically chooses the content to present to a user. This can be dependent on one or multiple pieces of information.

The questions with personalisation are: 1) Which content to show, and 2) What order to present this content in. Of course, the trick is to identify what the user wants to see!

Some websites are able to track a user’s journey through the website. This behaviour should give an insight into the consumer’s intentions and, therefore, targeted pages, information or products are presented to the user, based on their navigation thus far. Some websites are able to identify whether a user has visited before. This may indicate a higher level of interest and, therefore, specific content can be presented. Some websites even present content based on the locality of the user, whether it be on a country or hyper-local level.

Here at CSI Media, we have lots of experience in designing and developing sophisticated websites with clever CMS systems, allowing you to easily add new and exciting content. Furthermore, we can integrate clever personalisation techniques into our CMS system, so that your visitors are presented with specific content, dependent on the criteria you have stipulated. If you would like more information, contact us using the link below.