Creating a great user experience
Ensuring that you provide an excellent user experience of your website is extremely important as it’s a key contributing factor to how current and potential clients view your company. As websites are one of the most common tools used to reach a company’s desired targets, ensuring that its user-friendly is imperative, if the customer has difficulty navigating around your site, they will probably return to Google and continue their search elsewhere.
Not only is the navigation of your website important, there are multiple factors that contribute to increasing the user experience of your site. Webs discuss six key elements that need to be considered in order to have a good website, five of which are discussed below:
- Content:
The content of a website needs to be relevant and in line with the products or services offered by the company. Comparing our website to that of other companies, I can see that MANGO has ensured that relevant information is displayed on our site. The information is relevant because it includes things such as the variety of services we have to offer, the background of our company, correct contact details and the mission, vision and goals of MANGO. Having this information readily and easily available to the user contributes to their user-experience as one of the main aims of users visiting a website is for them to obtain general and basic information about that company.
- Navigation:
In my opinion, this is one of the deciding factors to whether I stay on a website or if I leave to find an alternative site. The navigation bar of our website is at the top of the screen and it includes drop down bars such as ‘About Us’, ‘Services’ and ‘Contact’, to name a few. It’s important that the navigation process for the visitor is as easy and user-friendly as possible. There is a general ‘rule’ is that a user should be able to find the information they require in three clicks or less.
- Call to action:
A call to action is an important aspect to include in your website as it leads the visitor to actually take action and engage with the company. I ensure that I add phrases such as “comment below” in my blog posts and “read the article here” in our social media content in order to increase audience engagement with and action from MANGO’s targets.
- Credibility:
In order to ensure the credibility and reliability of our website, we make sure that we include things such as a Client News blog that is regularly updated in order to showcase coverage that we have received for our clients. We also have case studies from different clients which include objectives, tasks and results as well as testimonials from current and past clients to allow visitors to read about the clients’ experience on working with MANGO-OMC. By making this information readily available on our website, we can show that we are a credible and reliable company to work with as we have proof of the return on investment that we have obtained for our clients through our PR and Communication activities.
- Mobile site:
Mobile internet usage is surpassing desktop usage and this means that your website needs to be mobile responsive. When we update our website, we make sure that the content we are loading translates well to the various devices that can be used to access the site. In turn, visitors making use of mobile devices while accessing our website are able to have a positive user-experience.
After working on the back-end of the MANGO-OMC website, I can see that the site is made up of all six of those key elements and more. Although following those key elements is important to create positive user-experience on our website, we also make sure that we maximise our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so that whenever users are searching for a PR and Communications company based in Cape Town for example, MANGO-OMC will pop up. Maximising SEO can be done by ensuring all photos, articles and other content added to our site contain relevant keywords. This is an important tool used by companies as it not only increases website traffic, but it creates an easy way for users to access our website.
