10 Steps to Creating a Great Business Website

1. Clearly define the results that you want your website to deliver and how these align with your overall business goals. Then work with appropriately skilled people to get the website built to achieve your business goals.
    
2. Identify which audiences (customers, prospects, investors) your website is being built for and work out what their different needs and expectations will be on visiting the site.
    
3. Ensure you build the site from your customers’ point of view and not your “what we do” point of view. Remember me, me, me is boring, boring, boring!
    
4. Avoid doing things your customers hate, (we get requests for these kind of features because the company building/requesting the website think they’re “cool”, “trendy”, “will make us stand out”, etc.). However having researched our own customers and referenced work carried out by other companies researching their customers, the things your customers probably hate, are:
   
   
   1. Flash Introductions/Welcome pages (the second most clicked on words on the web are “Skip Intro”).
   2. Music/Audio/Video with sound, that plays automatically on entering a site – many people are browsing at work, or whilst on the phone and find this intrusive and/or embarrassing.
   3. Hard to find contact details. Don’t forget people may not arrive at your site via the home page and will hopefully want to contact you, so make it easy for them.
   4. Hard to navigate sites. People have a good idea how most websites navigate now, so don’t try and be too clever and make it hard for your customers to find what they’re looking for.
   5. No prices. Ok, we understand this can be difficult in a lot of service businesses as each project may be priced according to many factors, however if your customer can’t even get a ball-park figure from you and they can from your competitor, who do you think they’re likely to contact first?
   6. Small or hard to read text. This comes up a lot. Not everyone has 20/20 vision, or remembered their reading glasses, so try and make your site at least as easy to read as the text in a paper-back book.
   7. Pop-up windows. You’ve seen them, do you like them?
   8. Letter-box shaped websites, these are the ones that waste lots of space above and below the site and end up looking like a letter-box in the middle of the screen.
       

5. Make the site easy to find in the first place, this includes marketing the site both online and offline using the best routes to your potential customers. This can involve creating content on social media sites, Search Engine Optimisation, networking sites, submission to search engines and other offline advertising such as networking, TV ads, Vehicle advertising, bill-boards, newsletters, etc.
    
6. Show each customer type that there is something here for them and ensure you include a call to action on every page.
    
7. Make the site easy to read, easy to navigate and similar enough to other sites that your customer doesn’t have to learn something new just to find what they’re looking for.
    
8. Provide the information your customers need in short easy to understand sentences.
    
9. Have a plan of how and what content will be added to/updated on a regular basis (this should be at the very least monthly, but preferably daily).
    
10. Regularly review the success of your website and revise and renew content/navigation paths to ensure each audience is getting the best experience possible from your site and that your site is helping you to achieve your business goals.