What makes a good website?
There are three key elements to website success:
- Providing a positive experience so that customers return – Don't make selling your products or services the prime purpose of your website.
- Converting the visitor to a prospect once they arrive
- Attracting the right visitors to your website & increasing traffic to your site
Element 1 – Ensuring Customers Return
Historically the purpose of a business web site was to sell stuff. The idea was people would come to your site and then contact you to become potential customers. Unfortunately for many businesses this doesn’t work because people ‘surf’ the web. How many times have you seen a website that might be of interest to you? You promise yourself you’ll come back to it - and within seconds of you moving on to the next site, you’ve forgotten about it.
So instead of using it to SELL to people, use it to GIVE things to people. There has been a shift in recent years from websites where the prime purpose is to sell products and services, to websites whose prime purpose is to begin a relationship with the visitor. The biggest challenge is to begin a relationship with your visitor before they move on to the next site. Your site should give potential prospects information that will make a real difference to them.
A good objective is to use your website to gather the contact details of visitors so that you can begin a relationship with them. Once you have their email address and permission to contact them, you can use this data to drive future marketing campaigns to people who have signified their interest.
Thus your website strategy into the email marketing strategy. To get their contact details you need to give them something of real value. Ideally, go beyond just a newsletter. Offer people a free report with some precious information, or a CD, or a demo. You need to make an offer so compelling, the casual surfer is persuaded to stop and give you their contact details and start a relationship with you.
Element 2 – Converting visitors to prospects
In terms of converting visitors to customers - the second key element to website success - this is a combination of factors:
Good page design - It must be easy for the visitor to become a prospect: this means supplying all the information required to answer any questions.
Good selling copy. Many believe that because reading text on-screen is inherently more difficult than reading print, websites should employ a 'less is more' approach to their copy by reducing it to bullet points and simple statements. However, in fact the reverse approach should be employed - on the web, longer copy sells better, in all likelihood because customers need as much information as possible to make a decision, and unlike in a bricks and mortar store, cannot hold the product in their hands or talk directly with a sales consultant. Testimonials, demos, screenshots, product features and easy-to-read copy are all crucial for closing the sale.
Approach the design of your website from this customer-centric point of view - find out what your customers & prospect want, make it easy for them to find it, present it to them attractively. Ensure that your site is the best that it can be, with plenty of useful and interesting content that visitors will appreciate. Make sure that all of the content on your website constantly communicates the specific benefits of what you have to offer. Put as much free, useful information on your website as possible.
Element 3 – Attracting the right visitors and increasing traffic
One of the main ways to increase traffic to a website is search engine optimisation. This is about optimising the website for these keyphrases using meta tags, page content, link structure, page formatting etc so that presentation of information is optimal for keyphrase relevance, and all the main pages of the site can be easily found and indexed by a search engine.
An additional part of the optimisation process is consideration of the listing which will actually appear in a search engine or directory's results: a top ten listing which no-one clicks on is effectively useless, so the listing itself must entice visitors to click through for more. Another option is to initiate an ongoing programme of high-quality link development, online directory submissions, and traffic-building for the short and long-term.
New websites (and new domains in particular) can be subject to an 'ageing delay,' a tactic employed to deter spammers which can lead to a wait of several months before a new site starts to appear in the results. For this reason you may need to supplement SEO activity with pay-per-click listings to bring traffic to the site while you wait for your site to show up in the 'organic' (free) results. This approach has the further advantage of generating quantitative data about the search terms that work for your site and post-click user behaviour which can be factored into your site design and SEO campaign for maximum return on investment.
So how do you consider these elements as part of your website development plans?
The key elements of success can be executed via a number of aspects of the website development which include: