The Importance of Honest Web Design

Trust is something that is valued in the world of business. Without trust, there is no bond between a client and a customer. Without trust, you make fewer sales and you don’t have customer retention. Trust is valued, but very hard to gain when it comes to running a business. This is because people have an inherent belief that large corporations and small businesses alike don’t care about what you want. They believe that companies exist to grab your money and they will only act nice to you if it gives them more money.

While this isn’t entirely untrue, it is a skewered opinion of what some business owners actually believe. Some honest business owners blur the line between “getting more money” and “treating your customers with respect”. This is because treating customers with care is an important part of how they operate. Everything from the packaging of products to their customer support and website is taken into account to give their customers a good experience.  This is why some companies decide to focus on interacting with their users. They want to put the customer first and would even risk money as long as it helps them retain a loyal fanbase. This is just one way to go about running a business, but it’s also a very sound way because customers love to feel valued.

Whether you’re a small at-home business or globally recognized corporation, transparency and honesty are two things that go hand-in-hand with building a loyal fanbase. Not everyone understands the importance of these two concepts, which is why this article was written. In particular, something that very few businesses get right on the first attempt is having a transparent and honest website. But what exactly is meant by that and how does it help your business?

Honest SEO practices

Search engine optimization is a hot topic in the world of web design. This is because you have to focus on ranking high on Google’s search results to be able to get exposure. Unfortunately, this means that many people aren’t completely honest with their SEO practices and they utilize what is known as black hat SEO. Black hat SEO has its advantages, but it is such an aggressive method of optimization that it can result in the removal of your website from Google’s listings. It is a short-term investment plan on a website that is planned to fail. It will spam keywords, links and invisible text just to abuse Google’s search robots and trick them into thinking their website is full of useful content.

As you might expect, black hat SEO isn’t good for long-term projects and businesses. In contrast, white hat SEO relies on honest methods. According to https://yoast.com/importance-original-content/, Google loves long-form content and it loves original content. When you combine the two, you have a recipe for success and you will be favored by Google because not only are you adding to the overall quality of the internet, you’re producing content that is entertaining and informative to your audience with an original angle. This gives you priority over other websites and thus, gives you a higher Google ranking that will stay there for the long-term. You are less likely to be banned, less likely to be removed from Google’s search listings, and you will be building a long-term reputation with your fanbase.

Manually designing for multiple platforms

Many website builders help you build a website using their built-in tools. These tools can also automatically scale your website to smaller devices such as smartphones and tablets. With the majority of web users accessing the internet on their smart devices, it’s no wonder that Google has started to give poor rankings to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. To combat this, you can usually rely on automatic methods and scaling to get your website to fit on smaller devices, but this isn’t optimal because it’s not perfect. There are many bugs that could occur and many templates for WordPress and other easy website builders aren’t fully optimized to run on multiple devices. As a result, the viewing experience for your customers who are on mobile devices will be poor and you won’t get them as regular visitors to your website.

Although many web building tools are sophisticated enough to automatically scale your website, you have to realize that it’s not perfect. You are going to have to manually design your website to fit the needs of your customers who are on mobile devices. You’ll have to change how menus and boxes are accessed, edit the way videos are shown and you might even need to use lower-resolution images or fewer images overall to preserve your user’s mobile data. You have to focus on how you can make a better website for everyone—not just your desktop users. Services like www.Poet.co/poet-media/web-design/ will manually help you design a website that fits every platform, browser and even operating system, so if you’re unsure how to do it yourself or prefer to leave it in more capable hands, always consult help.

Original content

Google loves to rank content based on originality. If you are writing your own content from scratch and you’re putting in a lot of effort into it, you will have a higher Google rank than you would if you stole other people’s content or reworded popular articles. If you constantly link to other articles, you won’t get as much exposure on Google as you would if you had lots of original content. Images are also important, and you could end up in a copyright lawsuit if you use images that you aren’t allowed to. According to forbes.com, a photographer that had their images display on a stock photo website is suing the company for approximately a billion dollars for using her work without permission. Unless you want to be in serious trouble, you’re better off using images on free stock photo websites such as Pexels.
With the help of tools such as Copyscape, you can do a quick check on if your content is infringing on any copyrights or if there’s any plagiarism. If it all checks out, then you don’t need to worry about your content being ranked low by Google and you can feel safe knowing that you have an honest website.

Photo Credit: #WOCinTechChat