Think of your company’s website as a first impression for potential future clients. Is it easy to navigate, and does it clearly convey your business’s products and services? If not, visitors may lose interest and abandon your site, which will not add up to repeat customers.

Here are 6 things to keep in mind when you sit down with your team to strategize your website.

1.  Make It Clear to Visitors What Business You Are In

Since you only have a few seconds to engage your visitors and keep them on your site, it’s important that your value proposition and intent be clear the instant customers hit your homepage.  Great visual design, animation, and pretty pictures can always enhance a website, but you need to take your business’s message into consideration, too.

Example:  “Sobe Live is Hip Hop”.  This is awesome.  I know exactly what I’m getting into before I even visit the venue.Make Your Website

2.  Easy to Use

Let’s face it, people come back to your website to either find out about an event or view pictures they were in from the night before.  These two options need to be front and center on your site.  The Internet is cluttered with bad nightclub websites, make yours one of the most usable, and you’ll attract an audience and form lasting relationships with your customers.

On this same note, the website needs to be easy to use for the person updating the website.  WordPress is the best platform to use for easy updating of your site.

Dig Deeper:  Top 5 Reasons to Use WordPress for your Venue or Event Promotion Website.

3. Don’t Underestimate SEO

If you’re site is not search-engine optimized, you’re basically cutting off almost all possibility for organic traffic or chance encounters with your venue.  At a minimum, be sure that you’ve generated a site map, and your title tags, heading titles, and site description are filled out appropriately.

Dig Deeper:  What does SEO mean for Nightlife Professionals?

4. Give Your Brand A Soul

Many venue and promoter websites lack soul. They tend to use stock imagery of women, static content, and generic web design – all of which undermines the user experience. That’s a serious problem because your site plays a crucial branding role, serving as the digital interface between your customers and your events. The best way to create a positive branding experience is to be yourself: Be transparent, speak to your customers on a real-time basis, and let them connect with each other through your brand.

Dig Deeper:  10 Inspirational Nightclub Website Designs (and why)

5. Don’t Forget the Mobile Web

Not too long ago, we considered mobile sites a nice-to-have add on. That is no longer the case. At present, approximately 5 percent of traffic to sites comes via mobile phone. And over the next year, as more smart phones hit the market, and carriers continue to enhance the capability of cellular wireless standards, we expect that number to dramatically increase.

What that means is that you and your venue need to be there.  Your mobile web strategy needs to center around creating designs for three screen sizes:  PC, smart phone, and the basic (or WAP) phone. Once you’ve covered the basics, monitor your site metrics, and if you have a growing and engaged mobile audience, think about getting into the application game.

Dig Deeper: 5 Reasons Why Nightclubs Must Adopt Mobile Marketing

6. Use Analytics to Track Everything

Your website redesign should never be over.  Make sure you identify clear and realistic brand and business goals for your site so that you have numbers to optimize against after you go live.  Then, you’ll want to think about the different parts of the experience you want to track in order to support your company goals.

Dig Deeper: 4 Easy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques for your Venue’s Website

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And if this article wasn’t enough, we have a checklist of 21 Factors to Consider When Redesigning Your Website.

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