How to build a killer website

Want to know how to build a killer website for your business? In this post I talk you through some of the less obvious, but equally important aspects of a killer website.

Table of Contents

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through these links I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products that I use and love or products that I want to try.

Choose a platform

First things first, before we dig into how to build a killer website you’ll need a platform to build it on. There are quite a few around such as ShowIt Squarespace and my area of expertise – WordPress. They all have their pros and cons but for me WordPress is the standout choice.

WordPress is the most popular website platform right now. At the last check more than 40% of all websites were using WordPress which is a colossal number. Choosing such a popular platform has to main benefits. There will be a lot of resources out there to help if you get stuck (such as my blog) and a lot of WordPress professionals around too.

WordPress is the most extensible – there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do with a WordPress website. This is through the use of plugins which are apps that you can add to your WordPress website to add some extra functionality. It could be something as small as adding social media sharing buttons to your blog posts or adding a shop to your site. The possibilities are endless with WordPress.

For more info on why I think WordPress is such a great platform, check out these blog posts:

What is WordPress? Why use it for your business website

What is WordPress for?

It’s also one of the more search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly platforms too. I won’t go into the detail of SEO here but it’s a great, free way of driving high quality traffic to your website.

If you’d like to find out more about SEO check out these blog posts and my workshop:

The Complete Guide to SEO for Beginners

The 5 best WordPress plugins for SEO

Do you need a sitemap for WordPress? Absolutely

SEO Simplified Workshop

The Winning Website Starter Kit

Are you sick of tech overwhelm?
Are you done with struggling with ALL the Googling trying to work out where to even begin with a website for your biz?
Do you wish you could just follow a step by step guide to get you started?

Then hello there, I’ve got you!

Over the last 4 years I’ve helped purpose driven small businesses just like you to go from website worry to website wonder. I’ve spent countless hours and $$$ learning from the best experts in my industry, and use that knowledge to build websites for my clients.

I know this stuff works… which is why…

I’m sharing the The Winning Website Starter Kit with you!

In this one-of-a-kind guide you’ll learn:

The exact steps you need to take to create a website from scratch
How to nail the scary sounding techy bits
What kind of content do you actually need to include
Design tips and tricks

If you want to know how to build a killer website, this guide could be for you.

I WANT THE GUIDE

Choose a goal for your website

Websites need goals. What is it you want to achieve from your website? Do you want to sell 1:1 services, a coaching package, sell digital products?

You can do all of these things but one of them needs to have priority. And it’s ok if that priority changes over time. Your website will evolve with you through the different seasons of your business.

You need no more than 2 goals and one of them should be to grow your email list. Once you’ve worked out what your goals are you can then look at crafting a user journey through your site and calls to action.

User journey

Before you start building your killer website I would recommend that you take some time to think about how you’re going to get visitors from a-z. How are you going to get new visitors from landing on your site to fulfilling the goal you have?

For a service based business it would probably look something like Home > About > Services Overview > Individual Service > Action

Home is the introduction to your and your business.

This then leads to the about page where the visitor gets to know you a bit better. Why are you the best placed person to help with the problem they have?

If they’re still engaged they’ll probably hop on over to your services overview page to see your services in a bit more detail than on the home page.

Then, if they like the look of them, they’ll likely head over the the service sales page for more in-depth info.

If they like that then they’ll take some action – whatever it is you told them to do on the sales page.

But don’t forget that not everyone will take the path you define for them, so you need to make sure that you’re encouraging them to fulfil your goal from elsewhere too. You’ll notice that there are prods towards joining my email list and products and services within this blog post.

Calls to action

Once you know what your website goals are you then have a main focus for your calls to action. Whether it’s to book a discovery call for your 1:1 service or to go buy your digital product.

Here are my top tips for effective calls to action

You will need more than one call to action per page – there’s no magic number, it depends on the length of the page
Use active language on your calls to action – Give me more info vs More information
Use buttons not links – buttons in contrasting colours to the background will stand out more and get more attention.
Add some kind of interaction – something like changing the colour when the mouse is hovered over the button

User experience

If you want to know how to build a killer website, before you start designing there are a few things to think about first. If your website isn’t somewhere visitors like to spend time it’s not a killer website. Here are some points around user experience that you should take into consideration.

Use standard conventions

Most of us running service based businesses are creatives. We like to experiment and push boundaries – it’s why we’re so good at what we do. But it’s not always a good thing when it comes to building websites.

When we browse the web we expect certain things to be in certain places or for certain things to behave in a particular way. For example, we expect menus to be at the top of the site or in a left panel. Some sites hide the menu until visitors click an icon. The icon option only works when the hamburger icon is used (3 horizontal bars stacked on top of each other). This works because it’s the standard icon for mobile menus.

Speed

No one will hang around and wait for a website that takes an age to load, so it’s important that your website loads as quickly as possible. 3-4 seconds is the benchmark, but if you can get your site loading quicker then do it.

Some tips for a quicker loading website:

Resize and compress your images before you upload them to your website
Use jpeg files for images and png for graphics with sharp shapes and text
For WordPress websites keep your plugins to a minimum. Be ruthless and only use the plugins you desperately need.
Switch to a better hosting provider. It’s really tricky to get a quickly loading website if it’s built on poor infrastructure. I recommend Lyrical Host or SiteGround for a great hosting experience.
Use a performance or caching plugin such as Swift Performance. Good hosting providers will have plugins that their set up is optimised to work with. For example SiteGround have their own plugin that they recommend their customers install on their websites.
Clean up your database. Use a plugin like WP Optimize to keep your database trimmed. The cleaner the database the quicker results will be returned.

Use the code KIMSCOTLAND10 for 10% off your first payment with Lyrical Host, if you decide to switch to them.

If you want to go into more depth on how to make your website load quicker check out these blog posts:
4 easy ways to improve website loading time

How to get your WordPress image sizes under control today

How to make your WordPress site load faster?

Website Speed Test – where do you even start?

Security

Make sure you have a valid security certificate. Modern browsers warn visitors before they even land on a website if it doesn’t have a security certificate. So if you don’t have one, it’s very unlikely that you’ll get many, if any, visitors. People are very careful of their personal information these days and won’t risk browsing an insecure website.

Make it easy to contact you

Some people might want to get in touch with you before they consider your services. They might have a specific question that they can’t find the answer to on your site. Some people might want to book a chat to make sure you’re the right person for them. So make sure that you make it as easy as possible for them to get in touch with you.

I usually add a clickable email address in the footer along with as many methods of contacting me as I’m comfortable with on my main contact page. There you’ll find an option to book a call, send me an email or contact me via social media. I don’t enjoy talking on the phone so I don’t list my phone number or have options to WhatsApp me either. But if you’re comfortable with those options then I would recommend you add them too.

Consistent branding and layout

This is very similar to my point about standard conventions. People like familiarity. So be consistent in your branding and layout throughout your site.

Stick to a colour palette of no more than 4 different colours and I would also say no more than 2 fonts. This will help keep your website consistent but will also help with brand recognition. I would also recommend that you choose a dark font colour like black or dark grey for text against a white background in addition to your 4 colours.

Not every page has to look identical but you should reuse different components throughout your site. For example, my testimonial sections look the same throughout this site. There is an image of the client’s website on the left with a coloured block to it’s right containing the testimonial content. The colour of the content blocks changes throughout the site but the text format doesn’t change.

Accessible

I am by no means a website accessibility expert, though I am learning. If you want to build a killer website then it shouldn’t discriminate against your visitors. Accessibility covers a lot of different areas but some things to think about would be:

Using easy to read fonts – keep script fonts to a minimum
Think about colour contrast – for example using white fonts against a yellow background would not be a good enough contrast. If you’re not sure, you can check your colour contrast ratio using the WebAim Contrast Checker.
Set alt descriptions on all images so that anyone using a screen reader has an image description to read out.
Use emojis sparingly – screen readers read out the emoji description when they come across them. More than one in a row or emojis placed within sentences sound awful through a screen reader.

Copy

“Design primes, copy sells” – Megan Martin. A well designed website is only half the story. A killer website needs killer copy. I am not an authority on writing words that sell, not even close. So I’m not going to give advice on writing copy for your website. It’s an area I’m working on at the moment and my next business investment will be in a copywriter.

What I do know is that ultimately building a killer website means having the words that help you connect with your dream clients along with a design that helps them consume those words in the most efficient way.

I have a handful of copywriters who I recommend if you want some help in that department:

Rachael Nicholson

Sarah Davis – The Parenting Copywriter

Graphics / images

I couldn’t write a blog post on how to build a killer website without mentioning graphics and images. You want to make sure that any images you add to your site are good quality. But it’s not the be all and end all if you don’t have professional headshots.

If you’re early on in your business journey (which I’m going to guess you are if you’re reading this post) you likely haven’t got a huge budget and found that brand images didn’t make the top 10 priorities for any cash you do have.

But that’s ok, you don’t have to plaster images of yourself throughout your site. A couple of decent images taken on a phone should be more than enough, and you can use stock images for everything else. Just make sure you check the license for any stock images you use.

FYI at the time of writing this post, the images of me on my site are ones where I was 6 months pregnant – that baby is now a fully fledged toddler.

You also don’t need to create an image heavy website for it to be effective.