Making A Great Website

So you want to make a website. Before you start, think about these questions and make sure you can answer them!

1. What is the aim of your website?
2. Who is your target audience?

You'd be surprised how many people who have well-established sites have never really thought about these two points. Yet they're the most important things to bear in mind when setting up your site.

What is it exactly that you want your website to do? Is it a place to share information? Is it somewhere you wish a community to form to dicuss topics? Do you have a product you want to sell? Your answer to this first question will set the basis for how your website it built and how it works from a user's point of view.

The more interaction you want visitors to have with your website, the more complicated it will be. Think about blogs, the most simple form of webpage out there. You write and people read, and have the option to comment on your postings. Then think about e-commerce sites, that have thousands of products updated all the time, with changing prices and secure payment gateways.

If you want a blog you'll find it quite easy to set up on your own. All the tools are readily available for free. For more complex websites you'll probably need to engage the services of a web company (unless you're good at design and coding yourself!) and this costs money. Make sure you have a budget in mind and find a company that services your bracket.

Now you know what you want your website to do, you should have some idea of your target audience. Who can you see visiting your website? Is it just your friends and family, people you've told the address to and who want to keep up with events in your life? Would you rather have people find your website through search?

Your target audience will dictate a lot about your website, from the way it looks to the tone of the copy. You need to think about this before the site is built, because deciding later on that all of your pages look wrong could be a very costly mistake!

If you're hiring a designer, they'll ask all these questions before you start, but its good to know yourself so that you can give them the right answers.

It's a great idea to do your research and look at other sites to find bits and pieces you like. This will help to crystallise your own ideas, and you can also show your web company what you've found to give them an idea of how you'd like your site to look and work.

If you're selling products, this is the perfect time to research your competitor's prices and make sure that you can compete. If a site looks very well-established you know that you have a lot of work to do to get to the same level. However, if you find a market that seems to have not been tapped, you can take full advantage.

Writing for the internet is very different from writing in paper publications. Web surfers are notorious for short attention-spans, and you're only ever just one click away from losing a visitor to your site.

Therefore, keep anything you say on your site succinct! Get the information across in an easy-to-digest manner, and make sure that it's all easy to find. For example, do you want people to know that you have a sale on? Put this information on your homepage, not tucked away where it will never be found.

Another golden rule is that you should never talk about yourself, only to reassure visitors that your site is trustworthy and contains useful information. As thrilling as your company history might be to you, no-one wants to hear about it. (Of course, if your website is a personal blog you should take this with a pinch of salt!). Waffling on about your company is irrelevant to most people and they'll leave before they even see what you have to offer.

Above I mentioned your target audience. You have to make sure that the tone of your copy appeals to them. If your audience is young, don't bore them. If they have a large disposable income, imbue your words with the lifestyle they can achieve with your help. If they're academics, don't make sloppy grammatical errors!

When planning your website, you should think about how you want visitors to behave. You can encourage behaviour through the use of 'calls to action', calls to make people do certain things. For example, if there is a particular page you want people to see, ask them to look at it! Have a 'buy it now' button to encourage sales and a 'sign up here' button to get a list of email addresses to send out your newsletter.

Calls to action help visitors to see what they can do on your website and can help to increase your sales. They give each page a purpose.

Don't forget to add an analytics package to your website so that you can track the effectiveness of each page. You can see how many visitors your website (and each individual page) has had, how long each visitor spent on the site, and even the top entrance and exit pages. This is a brilliant way to test out changes to the site as you can see the effects as they happen.

You can use the data you gather from your analytics packages to improve the performance of your site. For example, if you find that you get a lot of traffic from a particular keyword through the search engines, but only rank 5th for that term, think about the traffic you could get by ranking 1st! You can go to a search company and tell them what you want, or if you know about search, you can do it yourself!

After the launch of your website you can't expect instant results. After all, the search engines have to find it so that they can show it to people who search for you or your products. You might want to invest in some website marketing to make this process quicker.

There are lots of ways to get a good level of traffic to your website. The first is through paid advertising on the search engines or on other websites. This can be very effective and is measureable; you can measure the value of the sales you got from each visitor so you know your exact ROI.

The other ways are to either get high in the search results or tell people about your site. Getting good results may be trusted to a search company, and telling people about a site can be done on forums and community websites (like Facebook for example) or through traditional offline methods.

Bear in mind that the sort of results you can expect in the search results depend on how competitive your market is. To take an example, if you're selling mortgages you'll be competing against the high-street banks, but if you're selling Peruvian nose-flutes you may not have quite the same level of competition!

Your budget for SEO will have to be big if you want to beat a large competitor and results may take a while. Buying traffic on the other hand is a quick fix as adverts can be set up very quickly and a click is all it takes to set them running. As an instant fix to get traffic to your website as soon as its launched, paid advertising on the search engines is definitely the right solution.

This may all sound very high-tech, but just like in the old days, brand-building methods still apply. For your company to flourish people have to know about it, and there's still nothing better than word of mouth. Whether you advertise online or on flyers handed out in the street, you have to get word out that you exist and create a buzz about your business.

Many people build a website expecting success to follow like cause and effect, but like any other marketplace this just isn't the way. Creating a successful website takes a lot of time and effort even after launch to build up your visitors and (if this is the aim of your website) to get money coming in.