If any business needs to survive in the online market, they need a dynamic web presence. The following 6 factors should be considered when building a website:
1. Goals and objectives:
Most clients who have no idea why they want a website, until you ask them why. They are created because everyone has a website so they have one too.
Defining goals and objectives is the key to great website design. If you don’t have a pre-determined goal, then you’re wasting your time. Having no goals and objectives is like walking in the middle of the desert with no clear direction. For example, your website goal could be increasing sales, building communities, non-profit or educational. Yahoo is community based, Amazon’s website purpose is to increase sales. Goals must be measurable and realistic. For example, if you get 5000 visitors per month and aim at converting 2% of these visitors into clients, then your website objective should be 100 prospects per month.
2. Target audience:
Having a target audience should be part of your online marketing strategy. Your site should be solving a problem and aimed at a specific target audience. Do you have a target audience? Don’t make your target audience the entire population of the world. It should be your niche market. If you’ve got a product that says “for coaches and trainers”, guess what. You’ll get the attention of coaches and trainers because you will be directly addressing their needs.
Knowing where you’re going is important. But, knowing who you’re going after is also important!
3. Copy and content:
Good copy persuades your visitors to read your text and take action. Your headline is the most important element in your copy. If you have a terrible headline, your visitors will not want to read the rest of the copy. A good headline will arouse the curiosity of casual browsers and make them want to read more.
Having fresh content that is updated often will keep search engines and visitors coming back to your site. If you want the ability to update and change information yourself, consider having a content management system like WordPress installed.
4. Web Design:
Once you have defined your goals and objectives, developed your website marketing strategy and then written your copy, you are ready to begin working on the design of your website. This information should be passed on to your designer who can develop a site map on how all the pages will be linked to each other. It shouldn’t take more than three clicks to go to another page of the site.
5. Website Promotion:
How can you get more visitors to your website? Some popular website promotion techniques are SEO, pay per click advertising, building inbound links, eNewsletters, blogs, forums, press releases and submitting articles. Read more about how to promote your Website.
6. Measurement:
Once your site is optimized and promoted, check your website statistics to improve website conversion, copy, content etc. Are you converting visitors into prospects? It doesn’t matter how many people land on your website, but more importantly, how many of them actually take action, like for example, contact you. Keep tweaking your web pages and measure your response. Are those tweaks to your web pages, increasing your conversion rate? If it improves, keep the pages. Keep improving your copy and experiment with it until you’ve achieved your objectives.