With all the events and to-do’s that tend to come with the spring season, optimizing your website might not be at the top of your priorities right now. We at Seven Ages Design urge you to reconsider. Now is a better time than ever to reflect on what worked for your website in 2018, what’s working so far in the new year, and what an improved website can do to help accomplish the remaining goals you’d like to achieve this year. To give you some idea of where to begin, we’ve compiled a list of basic features we believe every website needs to be successful in 2019.

If you’re reading this from a mobile device, you’re not the only one. Mobile traffic increases every year, so custom web developers like Seven Ages Design will need to continue to utilize responsive web design.

A responsive website is one that can reconfigure its display for the device it’s being viewed from. Responsive websites have seen a surge in production due to their faster load times and easier navigation when compared to standalone mobile sites.

Due to their enhanced performance capabilities and seamless UX, having a responsive website is also becoming increasingly important to the success of companies’ SEO strategy. It’s not just that search engines want you to have a responsive website in order to rank highly – they’re requiring it.

Having a responsive website is a powerful way to help your company communicate its dedication to maximizing customer experience.

One second. That’s all the time you have to capture someone’s attention when they come to your website. Speed is a solid indicator you can use to predict a website’s success. That’s why we believe that 2019 will see a greater focus placed on maximizing website speed and performance.

If our experience tells us anything, it’s that reducing website speed is best achieved by hosting your website on dedicated servers. Using dedicated servers boosts page speed by giving you greater space, bandwidth, and processing memory to display your website with.

We also believe we’ll see wider adoption of CDNs among custom web developers. CDNs help reduce load times by caching static components of a website on local servers and storing them for later use. This means that users in Europe can access your North America-based website via a European server, which greatly cuts down the amount of work needed for your server to efficiently deliver content.

In the past few years, we’ve watched the potential of chatbots explode. What was once an optional feature for websites has evolved into an essential customer service tool for businesses. Not only do chatbots streamline the answering of customer queries, but they also limit the amount of human resources spent per customer interaction. Whereas humans can only handle a single case at a time, a properly implemented chatbot can effectively process limitless queries simultaneously. When your website’s visitors can experience this level of accessibility and instant service, your chances of converting them into real clients greatly increases.

Chatbots are also an immensely impactful brand building tool. Customer service agents can be under informed, overloaded, or unavailable. Chatbots don’t have this problem. If properly configured and maintained, chatbots can deliver the right answer to customers in every instance. Due to this lower tendency to make errors, chatbots help foster a reputation of providing consistently helpful and speedy customer service amongst your clientele.

This fascinating evolution of AI application is just the first step towards a more effective and seamless customer service experience – don’t miss the boat.

Regardless of whether you’re a small mom and pop store or a household brand, we at Seven Ages Design know the importance of telling a compelling story. Your website can be responsive, fast, and helpful, but the most effective websites are those with great copywriting.

Copywriting matters when it comes to making your website helpful, informative, and successful at converting leads. Copy is the lifeblood of your website; it’s what convinces your customers to explore and click between pages, share your content, and hurriedly input their information into a ‘Contact Us’ form.

Words are the vehicle through which you deliver your company’s history. They’re what makes a customer fall in love with your brand. They’re how you convince people your company is doing great things.
Above all, choosing the right words convinces your customer that their experience was worth having and that is one they’ll want to have again.

Web development and design is a consistently evolving field; just as new trends and best practices seem to make profound impacts, new ones pop up and take their place. Not outfitting your website with the current best practices could be a detriment to your customers’ experience while undermining your business’s success. Without an expert team like Seven Ages Design behind you, navigating this constantly changing space can seem overwhelming. Our development team keeps themselves educated on the latest optimizations, updates, and features to ensure that our clients’ websites are working their best at all times.

If you’d like to make your website work better for you in 2019, contact Seven Ages Design!