How to guarantee your website is a success
I have looked at and helped develop countless websites over the years and yes I have had a good cross section of experience on what works and what doesn’t. From over 10 years of building sites it is clear there are some key factors that will dictate whether your new website will sink or swim.
Ready? Lets get them out and clear!
How integrated is the site in the aims of the business?
If the site is created as an online brochure packed with what you think the customer wants it will fail very quickly.
The site should be central and key to everything you do and everything you want to achieve, without this focus it will never shine.
Who looks after the site?
Anyone who thinks the website is an IT issue or even worse an office juniors job may as well have just burnt the money. The website is another employee or a team of employees working round the clock for your business, they need help and they need resources.
What happens to the orders and enquiries the site gets?
They should go into the person best placed to convert business or directly into the accounting system as soon as possible. If the costs of pulling orders directly into the accounting system is too expensive remember that even having orders that get entered by hand in will be far far more efficient than telephone or fax orders. With telephone and fax etc your sales people have to interpret the requirements whereas the orders from the web are entered as part number, qty very quickly.
The web is an opportunity for efficiency
Make sure the site is fresh and reaches out to your customers
The worst thing possible is to have a site designed that is static and cant be changed without spending more money with your web developer. You need to make sure that you have a content management system included that is simple to use and easy for every member of staff to learn and help contribute. The best companies have sites that allow their most experienced staff members to add content easily and some even take it as far as having suppliers write content for them or even have people like the warehouse add content about how deliveries are made etc.
Listen to your customers, in person and in stat form
Analytics can tell you a huge huge amount about your customers and will be the main factor in helping you decide what content or changes to make. Simply adding something like Google Analytics (Its free!) will open up a wealth of information on who visits the site, from where and why. It should be a weekly meeting in the diary for key staff members to go through the stats and look at what can be done to improve the sites performance (More on that later too!)
Other services that can help in this area and some of my personal favourites: -
Get Clicky Great web 2.0 analytics service offering some great features. For example I can watch a visitor come into the site live and follow where they go and what they do. It includes a handy ip based google map showing you where the visitor comes from. In demonstration once we watched as a competitor came into the site live and read through the new offers they had!
CrazyEgg.com Another cool analytics site, key feature i love here is heatmaps.. these are graphical overlays of your site showing where the visitors clicked or moved their mouse, fantastic for seeing where your site isnt doing what you hoped.
Add the human touch to the site
Make sure that you try to project the personality of your business on to those customers who want to know more. Many websites are cold and business like, some really special ones have info about staff members, profiles and news. All of them help foster a feeling of warmth between you and your customer
Call in the professionals where you need them
Nobody knows your content and market like you do and if you listen to your customers you are half way there but when it comes to the specialist services its always best to get advice. These areas are where I would call in help: -
SEO - Search engines are complicated things and getting the site in a state that allows you to be ranked is very important. They will also be able to help you build up the links that youll need to gain that all important authority and beat the competition
PPC - Pay per click advertising is an easy way to lose your money fast. I cant stress how much better you’ll find the experience of online advertising if you get your campaigns managed by someone who does it every day.
SEM - Your SEO people will no doubt be able to help you with some overall marketing online.
Conversion consultancy - its far far easier to double your conversions than double your traffic, whilst this can seem like an extravagance for new sites it should be more than self funding.
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