Website can be broken down into two main categories; online brochures or resources of knowledge, opinions, products and media that portray your business as an authority in your industry.
In order for most websites to succeed you must give them the attention and content to cultivate growth. Websites need the right content as well as the correct framework and behind the scenes information (ie: title, description and keywords) to be seen by the search engines as a viable resource not to mention the site needs a certain aesthetic appeal and ease of use so humans will use it.
Another aspect of a successful small business website would be in many cases a blog or some kind of article database for your visitors to browse. This blog platform should encourage interaction from your visitors by allowing them to be able to comment on your site. Make sure you are able to monitor those comments so it won’t backfire.
Social networking sites have erupted over that last handful of years. By tapping into this resource you can pinpoint your target market or niche market and interact with them which means you can continually put your brand in front of your customers and potential customers. The popular sites for social networking would be LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
Websites are evolving growing things, or at least should be. You want to continually bring viewers back to your site and to do this you need fresh content. Exciting fresh content is what drives your viewers back. Add features to your website that make bringing viewers back much easier. Features such as RSS feeds or email newsletter sign-ups.
Look into updating your website especially if you have not in a few years. Many websites that have not been updated in a few years are websites that were built on what is now an outdated method of building websites. The most common method I have seen are websites built on tables without using modern web design techniques such as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.