Yes, nice design - but does it work? Sometimes you can drown in how beautiful your website is and forget that it should be functional in the first place. To help you out, I have five tips for you. Take them to your site builder for that new site, or take a critical look at your current site. Just do it!

1. Homepage

Note: your homepage is not for getting lost on! I see them too often, those homepages that seem to be made to drown the visitor in words, which only rarely really cohere. You don't have to tell everything there, as long as you tell your visitor where everything is. Think of your homepage as your website's signpost. Even if you didn't have a menu, the homepage should allow you to get to three or four of your most important sections of your site. Depending on the size of your site, there may be slightly more, of course. Take another look at your homepage and remove what doesn't necessarily need to be there.

2. The main action on your page

Do you ever have that? That you look at a website and think, "Yes, but what should I do next?" It's not just that only your sales pages should be an end goal of your site, but you should also make sure that your visitors (read: potential customers) can get there in the easiest way possible. A nice button helps with that, of course. But ideally, make sure that most important button on your page not is in your corporate colours! Use a complementary colour, that will stand out even more! I deliberately say "most important" because you can have more than one, you know. As long as the most important one stands out.

Complementary colours are colours that are opposite each other in the colour wheel. Adding a complementary colour makes the element in that colour stand out. Very basic are these colours: red versus green, yellow versus purple and blue versus orange

By the way, that could also be that newsletter button, or a share button. It's just what you have identified as the most important.

3. Preferably no laaaaaaaaan long forms

Unreadable, those long forms. And I actually prefer not to fill them either. Just make sure your form is as short as possible. For example, you don't need an address at all for a first contact or a request for information; an e-mail address will do. Apart from the AVG issues, in that case the address only makes a form unnecessarily long. And besides, once contact has been made, that address can be retrieved in no time.

Incidentally, this applies to registration forms, contact forms, information requests and so on. Limit the number of fields and get more emails.

4. 10,000 links in your footer

Seriously? Your footer (the bottom of your website) is not Home Page*. Try linking only to the main sections or main pages you haven't already linked to. Link to all subsections from those pages. Of course, repeat the link to your contact form or shop, depending on what your main goal is. But make sure that footer stays a bit clear, even or maybe especially if your website has been around for five years. Google doesn't think all those links are clear either, and doesn't know which one is most important to your visitor. Avoid proliferation.

* Home page: Page where we all used to start on our search for anything. It contained all the Dutch links on the internet (well, almost then). Now, of course, we do it via Google.

5. Optimise for speed

In most cases, an elaborate design with all sorts of frills entails that the page loads slower. Fine, those suddenly flying blocks of text and jumping up and down words. Or that one slider that so beautifully displays all those photos one after the other. It's unnecessary, if you're completely honest.

It is also of no use, if me being very honest. It's even worse. Often, those frills require an extra piece of code to be loaded. A lot of those bits of code (e.g. so-called JavaScript) create a kind of threshold that Google and visitors have to cross before they see your website. Take a look at what's moving at your site and you'll know right away if you might be slowing down your website yourself. Oh yes, also remember that a slow website just doesn't do as well in Google....

That's five! Of course, many more can be determined based on your specific website. Maybe a good idea to take a look at that together?