The high-speed embrace of social media platforms by businesses big and small causes some to take their eye of the ball when it comes to their web sites. Use these guidelines to ensure your site resonates with visitors.

1.0 Absolute Must Have Functionality

• Don’t have funky menus – menus make/break a good site – if visitors can’t navigate through your site your in trouble right?
• Grok above the fold – essential content has to be above the bottom of the visitor’s screen & your newsletter sign up & social media accounts.
• SEO strategy: well-done meta tags, the Yoast plug-in, share your site on Twitter, cross link pages and embed links to old posts in new.
• Love load times – your site should load under than 2.5 seconds. Load times impact Google rankings and visitor experience. Check speed with Pingdom
• Don’t scrimp on images – images drive branding as much as content: Getty Images  has best quality but pricey, Istock Photo is good alternative (owned by Getty.
• Be Smartphone Friendly – recognize 30-50% of your traffic is visiting via a Smartphone.
• Google Analytics and Webmaster tools – install and set these up. #justdoit
• Capture the heart and mind of your target market with stellar UX/UI design

2.0 Add On Features You Need Downstream

• Incorporate Sharing Functionality – this can be done via a ShareThis plug-in across your entire web site.
• Enable Comments – using DisQuis or built in capability with WordPress; but note you need to monitor these on an ongoing basis.
• Create a sexy Contact Us page – don’t throw out a boring form page; this is the last page many visitors may see. #dontbeboring
• Get Your Blog Out There– should be in your Universal menus (at top of all pages) and visible to all visitors and syndicated using content syndication platforms.
• Takes some risks with your design – we are used black and white photos on our home page and went with a retro look. #standout
• Be Link Gracious Across Your Site – it’s au contraire to many, but linking out to other sites conveys brand confidence.
• Check our real time Analytics via Mix Panel –  monthly subscription costs based on usage. But, very cool.

You’ve built the site and now what do you do to get traction? Blog when/where you can and share your content across the social web.

Good web site design can be distilled down to specific attributes and we hope this blog post gives you a good snapshot of what you need to do to ensure your web site looks great and drives marketing ROI. Got questions – we have answers, please reach out.

Bonne chance and call, Tweet or contact us if we can help you.