In an online world, your website is your business identity; it’s not just your predominant marketing tool, it’s who you are. Whether people are looking for a job, a new business relationship, or just a product to purchase, your website is the first place they go to discover who they may be dealing with. Your site has to convey your vision in a way that makes you stand out from all your competitors; and it needs to do so in seconds.
Your website can’t help you if visitors won’t engage with it, and in the worst case it can make a bad impression before it even finishes loading. Even if it does load you only have a few clicks at most to engage a potential visitor before you can kiss them goodbye forever.
Before you start work on your website, you have to know what you need. You can’t build a great website by accident; you need to know what you want it to do and how you want it to do it. That means asking yourself questions because the answers are what determine the best site for your needs. Once you know what you need, you can move forward and build a website that works for you.
Every business is unique, but these questions should give you a good place to start:
- Does your site tell your visitors what your business does and why?
- Does your site look just as good on mobile as it does on the desktop?
- Does your site make it easy for customers to find the information they need?
- What do you like about your competitor sites and why do you like it?
- How does https://gtmetrix.com/ rate your site’s performance in comparison to them?
- Does your copy focus on your customer?
- Does your navigation make it easy for customers to get around your site?
- Is your site your best sales representative?
- Do you want people to find your site easily with keyword searches?
- Do you know who you want to visit your site, and who are they?
- Do you know how many people visit your site?
- Do you know which are your most popular and least popular pages?
- Do you have a way to track visitors and capture data?
- What are your ultimate goals for your website?
- Do you have plans to grow and develop your website in the future?
- Which sites do you visit regularly outside your industry?
- Does your site feature cool and engaging content?
- Do you have a reason for customers to visit your site repeatedly?
- Do you invite visitors to share your content?
- Is your site designed to work with social media?
- Do you provide ways for visitors to interact with your site?
- Does your site reflect the fact that driving sales is the most important thing it can do?
- Does your site really help you achieve your business goals?
It’s all about the eyeballs; you need to attract the right eyes to your site and you need to keep them coming back.
Any time you design or refresh your website your goal should be to create a site that draws visitors to you and turns them into advocates. Persuasive copy, a strong image, and continuing engagement are the tools you need to draw people to your site and keep them coming back again and again. Repeat visits mean repeat business!
Article by Dave Robinson
