As a web company, we’ve
seen it all and can tell you from our experience that there are five things
that apply to every good website that we’ve created:
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| Clear Goals Keep Your Website Focussed |
1. Have Clear Goals
First thing’s first – if you don’t set out clear goals for your website, how do
you expect it to achieve them? Be very clear with yourself (and your website
company!) what you want your website to accomplish online. Do you want your
website to bring more bookings for
your hotel? Maybe you want it to generate more
sales leads? Maybe you’re looking to sell
more products online? Whatever
it may be, be clear with your goals and a good web company should be able to
advise on how you can best achieve them using the web.
Bearing in mind the goal (or goals) of your
website should help you make good choices when making important decisions, on
everything from design to build to promotion.
2. Apply a Strategy to Achieve Those Goals
Once you have decided what your goals are,
you will need to create a plan to
make them happen. If you are happy to create your own web strategy – that’s great,
however - we would always recommend running it by your web company before
sending them detailed instructions, as they may have advice to offer and tools
you may be unaware of that could help improve your plans and possibly take you
in a different, more lucrative,
direction.
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| Websites Should Evolve And Improve |
The other option is to pay a web company to create your strategy – although this can be a
more expensive option, a good web
company will be able to draw from a huge amount of experience in order to provide you with the best outcome possible,
after all it is what they are trained at
(and if they are as geeky as us, what they are passionate about!). Giving a web team the responsibility to work on
improving your website for you,
allows you to spend more time on what you’re
passionate about – your business.
3. Don’t be a Perfectionist
Once you’ve got your first draft strategy,
you’ll need to work with your web team to get it up and running. Many web
projects fail simply by never getting
finished. If you have grandiose ideas of the perfect website (or if anyone is promising you this) stop right now
– the perfect website does not exist.
Websites always have room for improvement and growth, just like any business
does. The first thing you’ll put online is a first draft that will need to be built up and improved with time.
You need something online before you can start measuring its successes or
failures and addressing them, so although it
is vital that your website works the way you want it to, remember to avoid delays on making
‘final’ decisions about the site – these won’t be your final decisions, just your
first decisions.
A website that is 80% polished and online,
is going to perform much better than one that is more polished but not
available to the public. And as soon as you get your website online, the sooner
you can improve it using real evidence rather than your best
guesses.
4. Measure the Success of Your Strategies
You’ve decided on your goals, created a
strategy and put your website online – now what?
It is absolutely vital that you measure the outcomes of your strategies. There are
plenty of tools
available on the web to do this (we use Google Analytics) and
they can provide you with great insight
into how well your website is working, showing you things like which pages
people are leaving the website on and which pages people spend the most time
on.
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| Don't Use Guesswork - Use The Facts |
In this manner you (or your web analyst)
will be able to tell where on your site things are working well and where on your
site still has room for improvement. It also allows you to test out things that you aren’t sure about - for example, if you
aren’t sure where to place your email address on your website, you can place it
in the top right part of the page for a month and then move it to the top left
part of the page for the next month and measure where was most effective. You no longer have to guess what your
customer wants – you can test it and let them show you!
5. React to Your Statistics
Many website owners have stats but either
don’t know how to interpret them or don’t have the time to deal with them, yet
it is so important to react to your
statistics. If your stats are telling you that a page is performing poorly, you
or your web developer need to make sure something is done to improve this – or there is no point in having statistics.
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| All Stats And No Work Makes Websites Fail |
Once you know which pages or parts of your
website might not be performing to their best ability, you can react in a number of ways – changing designs, changing
content or even just reshuffling elements of the page can have huge effects on
reaching your goals.
Our motto is ‘keep testing, keep improving!’ (You can tell we are an exciting
bunch).
Armed with these 5 things in mind, you should have
everything you need to get started on a great website for your business. A good
website requires a lot of work from a
business owner and a web developer – but the hard work most definitely pays
off!
Let us know if you have any other great tips in the comments
below – or if you’ve used our tips to create good website, please link to it
below and show it off!
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