A website is essential to every business in today’s world. It is an absolute must. Compare it to not advertising in the phone book ten years ago. If a person wants to know more about anything, the first place they turn is the internet, which is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With search engines, such as Google.com or Yahoo.com, the information they are looking for can be found in seconds. This is even more the case as more and more people are using their cell phones to access the world wide web.
If people are looking online for things they want to buy and information about, well, whatever. You need to be there.
Even if you are not selling products or services online you still can have a very effective presence on the web to tell your story or provide key information to your loyal subjects. Here are a few components that your site should have to help make it a little more successful.
What’s the point?
I seem to go to more and more websites that take me a while to figure out what they are selling or offering. It is important to have a clear, well thought out purpose that is conveyed on your homepage within seconds of visiting. You need to get the gist of your purpose across to your viewer before they click the back button to find a site that will better convey that same point.
My Eyes! My Eyes!
The site needs to look good. Lets step outside the wonderful world wide web for a second and take a look at other means of business. Have you ever walked into a store and been amazed at how messy or dirty a store was? Maybe its a clothing store and the garments are strewn about all over the racks. There is not much order to the shop at all and the not so helpful employee is off chatting on the phone. The same concepts apply on websites. The site should be clean and visually appealing. There should be helpful information that is easily accessible to the viewer.
The colors should be well thought out not just randomly picked. There should be a balance of content and negative space that the user finds refreshing, not cluttered.
The right writing
Don’t just say more, say more with less. Try your best to effectively get your point across without just rambling for “more content” purposes. Need I say more?
Simplify
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” ~Albert Einstein
I can’t really add anything to that.
Nurture, nurture, nurture
Your website needs attention. Adding content, tweaking keywords and using analytic software to determine where changes should be made, these are all very important things that you need to do on your website. You cannot expect to put a site up on the web and sit back and watch it get tons of traffic. There are also no guarantees that your efforts will shoot you to the top of the charts. Everyone else is out there doing the same thing so you have to continually give people a reason to come back to your site by adding news, articles, latest sales or whatever makes sense for your niche.