What makes a great business website?

If you start looking for information about websites, the most common question you'll find people ask is "How do I market my website?" Being the helping sort, I'll usually visit their website to see what it's like, only to wonder why they're trying to market it.

Most people don't have a marketing problem, they have a boring website problem!

If you visit your average website, you'll find about 5 pages of content and usually they just want to get their hands on your money.

So I what I want to talk about instead, is "What makes a great website?"

Because when you have a great website, marketing becomes a walk in the park.

A great website is one that gives the visitor exactly what they want. It's not complicated, your visitor came looking for a reason, so what was it?

Once you start looking at your website while asking yourself "How can I help my visitors?" it becomes a completely different story. If you genuinely set out to help people, you'll find the road to a popular website a lot easier to travel.

So what are visitors looking for? Well, if you have a business website...it's not your product. It's the solution to their problem. So you need to ask yourself what their biggest problem is and then solve it.

Now, it's not always easy working out what their problems are. It takes a bit of thought and patience, but eventually you'll get there.

And you'll find your visitors have many problems just waiting to be solved.

How does this help your business? Well, if you're the trusted advisor that solves their problems, who do you think they'll turn to when they need products to solve their problems? You do sell products that solve their problems, right?

Trust me, traffic will not solve your problems. I see a lot of small business websites and 99.9999999% could do with improvement (including my own!)

The fact is, if your website was so great, people would be visiting it.

If you create a website that solves visitors problems, a magical thing happens:

They come back and visit again! And if your website really is top notch, they'll even tell their friends.

Especially in the new world of the Internet where sharing great information has become so easy, traditional word of mouth advertising has been put on steroids.

Create something worth visiting, and the traffic will come. I'm not saying you won't have to nudge it a little and do your marketing homework, but your marketing will become a thousand times more effective if you have something worth visiting.

• Read the related Hub Increase website traffic by being different.

By now you've worked out what your customers biggest problems are. Being an expert in your industry, I'm sure you have lots of great tips and techniques to help your visitors solve their problems. If you don't, you may consider doing a little research!

Once you've gathered all the information you need, you need to present it. In the good old days this would usually be in the form of an article. Now, you can choose an audio podcast, or even a video to help your visitors. Sure, articles are great, but there's nothing like being a little different with some videos on your website.

But once again, what's best for your visitors? Sometimes a video will be clumsy and time consuming. Sometimes an article will be boring and dry. Sometimes they'll want to listen to your audio podcast in their car to save time. Sometimes you'll want to make all three to satisfy every possible visitor.

I realise you probably want a little more information, perhaps even a step-by-step on how to go about creating your great website. Well you're not going to get it for now.

The biggest barrier to success that holds most people back is analysis paralysis and procrastination. The best thing you can do right now is get started and take action.

So start writing your content and I'll be back soon with more tips for your website. Remember, if you focus on helping your visitors the rest will fall into place as you go.