A website is an always-available shop window for your business; of course, this is essential in recruitment to enable clients and candidates to find you and the jobs you have on offer. If the first thing you need to start your business is recruitment software in the UK, the second is most definitely a good website.
This is not just any website. You need a site that provides the best possible customer experience to ensure users can find what they are looking for and won’t be tempted to go elsewhere.
Need for Speed
Any website needs to load quickly. When transacting online, people have notoriously little patience and will soon look elsewhere if your page is slow to load or hard to navigate. You can have the best recruitment software in the UK but you are likely to lose customers if your website doesn’t deliver on time. Google offers a free service to measure your page speed and give you tips.
Use Links Well
Clearly, people are not going to find all they need on the first page of your site; therefore, you need to make it easy for them to navigate. Online links are traditionally blue and there is no real reason to deviate from this – it is what users have come to expect.
There are exceptions, of course, such as links in menus and navigation buttons, but you still need to make sure that these are easy to access. Choose their position carefully and select colours and text styles to ensure they are clear and readable.
Heads Up
Headings are important to help your site visitors. As with links, they need to be clearly differentiated from the main text; in addition, they need to be well chosen and well written.
Search engines will give greater priority to headings over other content, so you need to make sure they are relevant and, where possible, that they include keywords people will be likely to search for.
Consistency
We have already talked about various elements of website design; in addition, it is important to keep your design consistent across all pages of the site. Big changes between pages can confuse users and make them think they have accidentally ended up on another site.
Keep navigation consistent, with menus in the same place and the same colour scheme across all pages of your site.
Mobile friendly
Increasingly, people are accessing the web on their smartphones and tablets rather than on computers. This means it is essential that you ensure your site is mobile friendly. Search engines also now penalise sites that don’t work properly on mobile; therefore, ensuring your site is responsive, checks what device it is being viewed on and adapts well to all devices is vital. There are online services that enable you to check how your site looks on other devices.
