5 Ways To Make Your Website Stand Out From the Crowd

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Whether you’re putting together a website for yourself, your business or a charity, you will doubtless want people to notice it, and to attract as many relevant people as possible. Sure, not all website owners have the same aspirations for how they wish people to respond to their website. For some, it might be all about maximizing sales. Others, meanwhile, may wish to accumulate e-newsletter signups or simply get people to donate to their cause.

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Nonetheless, standing out is what pretty much everyone wants their website to do. So, here are some great ways to ensure exactly that.

Build a strong brand

Naturally, what exactly I mean by “brand” here will differ depending on whether your website is for an organization, or instead a personal website.

Basically, branding is about creating a distinctive and compelling identity and image for your website. It’s about setting out what makes you – as a person or organization – different. So, you should definitely be paying a lot of attention to your website’s “brand”.

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to defining your personal or organisation’s brand identity. And once you have, you need to think carefully about how you will communicate your brand values throughout your website, including in its logo, images, text, and so on.

Develop it on WordPress

The content management system (CMS) known as WordPress is everywhere these days – in fact, it effectively “powers” more than two thirds (38%) of the web. That’s an astonishing figure.

There are good reasons for that popularity, though. As Rich Mehta at the WordPress design and development agency Rigorous Digital has explained, WordPress isn’t just free and easy to use – it also enables you to use a wealth of themes and plugins.

That means, even if you’re a novice at website building, you can quickly use WordPress to assemble a really distinctive website – and not only that, but keep it regularly and easily updated, too.

If like me, you struggle with HTML and the “technical side” of creating a website and developing a professional looking website then you might want to consider pay monthly websites which are expertly designed for you. You pay monthly so it’s a more affordable option too!

Use your own images

Do you cringe when you load up a website and immediately notice super-obvious ‘stock’ photos? I swear that I’ve seen the same smiling customer-service lady supposedly working for four or five different companies now. And if I’m laughing at businesses’ stock photos, you can bet that plenty of people will be smirking at yours.

So, if you can, try to steer clear of the usual stock-photo sites when sourcing images for your website. Creating your own high-quality images is one way to do that, but so is obtaining your images from slightly lesser-known stock photo sites.

Maintain an up-to-date blog

This is another way in which building your website on WordPress makes a lot of sense – because it’s super-easy to add a blog on a WordPress site, and then write and publish regular posts for it.

This does several things to make your website stand out. Firstly, it gives the readers of your website a stream of fresh and relevant content for them to be engaged by. And secondly, it sends a message to search engine spiders that your site is an active one that is being constantly updated. That, in turn, will help you to achieve better search engine rankings for popular terms.

Write compelling and relevant content

OK, so this is sort-of building on my previous point – but it’s also important enough to be worth a point of its own.

Remember that human beings who visit your site won’t be doing it for the sake of helping you out – or presumably not, anyway. That’s because they’ll want to know what you can offer them. They’re likely to want to know particular information – and they will want your content to be readable and interesting, rather than irrelevant and boring.

So, your website’s content – whether it’s on the homepage, the ‘About Us’ page, the blog or elsewhere – needs to be captivating, relevant and actionable. If you get your content right, you’ll already be doing better than a lot of other websites out there.

There you go – five ways to make your website stand out from the competition. What do you think – are there any other great ideas I’ve missed out? If so, let me know your thoughts in the comments section.