What makes a web site work?
September 5th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I spend a fair amount of time looking at websites. Some I am looking at for information, others I am studying for what makes them successful – and others I am working on for clients. If you have spent enough time on the internet I am sure that you have seen your share of the good, the bad and the very ugly.
With the variety of easy to use software available today, anyone can put up a web site. But having a web site does not do anything for your business if you did not design it with a purpose. Do you want your site to drive customers to purchase? To consider your services? or are you using the site to just be a yellow pages ad for people to know you are on the web but there is no action to take place?
And once you have a web site, do you immediately believe you need a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter stream and a LinkedIn Group? Maybe you do, but more likely you do not. If you have no plan in place, no objectives to measure and no staff to commit to updating your content I would recommend you save your time and avoid being on the web at all. If on the other hand you have set your objectives, understand the success metrics, have a steady stream of content and are ready to start making money, then by all means – open your registers and start posting!
A common misconception is that any one of your web activities can stand alone. In reality, the most successful sites are supported by traffic that is driven from blogs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Activities driven by your company, and your employees, are creating leads generated from external sites driven to your website.
Some key questions to consider when looking at your site:
* Does your marketing team have the expertise and bandwidth to create content on a weekly basis?
* Does your company need all of these tools (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) or are only some relevant to your business?
* What action are you asking a person to take when they visit your site?
* Do you have metrics in place to measure success?
Once you can answer these questions you can answer the most important question of all: can we do this in-house or is now the time to consider hiring this out? What you may have thought was a savings in the end can cost your company more in revenue if not done properly. Your website is just like the outfit you so carefully picked out for your client meeting, there is only one chance to make a first impression.
