5 Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Website

Katie is the creative behind The Brand Boutique – a Perth-based marketing and design boutique for fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands.

With over 15-years experience running marketing departments for brands like Crown Perth, she not only has a wealth of marketing knowledge and eye for design, but is your go-to for Squarespace and Shopify websites. She is the web designer behind websites for Sleeping W. The Enemy, Boho Blonde, Something Borrowed, Freelance Lane… just to name a few!

Here she shares her top tips to get the most out of your website.

1. Invest in Photography

It’s one of the most important investments for your brand and will elevate your website from good to amazing! I always suggest capturing a mix of styled product, your workspace and the faces behind the brand making the magic happen. For e-commerce sites, some added product only shots with a white/ transparent background will help to break up the design on your site.

2. Optimise your images!

Image SEO starts with the file name so take some time to rename files to include key words (i.e. An image with file name bb-shopify-website will index better than DSC2456.jpg). Large image files can also impact SEO as well as the load time of your site, so try and keep images under 500kb. If you have Photoshop, a quick tip to batch reduce image size is to head to File > Scripts > Image Processor and you can do an entire folder with one click!

3. Explore the plugins and app libraries available on your platform to enhance styling and functionality.

Think wishlists, product reviews, live chat, cart add-ons – anything that can improve customer experience. Ghost Plugins is an awesome resource for Squarespace and the Shopify App Library will blow your mind with ideas. There’s even some fun ideas for promotions like spin the wheel, scratch and win etc!

4. Utilise inbuilt SEO and marketing channels

Shopify, Squarespace and even WooCommerce and Wix have inbuilt SEO features and taking the time to set this up and name your pages correctly will help to optimise your site. If you have a Shopify store, add Google and Facebook to your Shopify dashboard to not only sync your products to the channels, but to run some of your marketing campaigns within Shopify. They have some great campaign templates and the reporting feature allows you to clearly see conversion results.

5. Update regularly!

Your website should not be a set and forget but constantly evolving. There’s nothing worse than visiting a site and seeing it hasn’t been updated in years! Schedule in time to do regular audits of your site to refresh images and make sure your information like price list, address and contact numbers are up to date! The usability of Squarespace and Shopify platforms allow you to easily change-up your layout and features to always keep your site fresh and inviting.