Most people want their website to succeed, which usually means getting them noticed, increasing their contacts and often their sales.
But how should you go about developing a new website ?
OR
updating a current one to do this ?
Lot’s of the time people build their website based on personal preferences or because “they think it should be like that”. This is flying blind and mostly results in a website that don’t produce the results they want. People are usually very knowledgable about their own business, but they AREN’T specialists in website development and in using the internet for business.
Here’s a recent example …
I’ve been re-developing a website that’s about 8 years old and has been left way out of date with the advances in mobile use and social media.
So as it’s been coming together I’ve been telling the client what practices and rules-of-thumb have been increasing business for others. And I’ve been trying to incorporate all the things that are working for successful marketers into their new website.
But this is what is asked …
- “I think this should go here – that’s where I like it – what do you think ?”
- “A volunteer said the page heading’s are too large, please reduce the font size.”
- “Remove the Twitter and G+ social sharing buttons from the site as we won’t be using them at this point.”
- Move the Facebook Like button from the top-left of the page to the bottom of the page. Is the bottom of the page enough ?”
Just on those last 2 points … even without investigating, you could guess that lots of people don’t make it to the bottom of a page. But if you know the stats – roughly only 9% make it down, and this tells you how useless it is placing social sharing buttons there. And of course removing them completely is cutting down potential exposure a lot !
So how should you go about setting up your website and online business ?
- Start off by learning and following the best practices that are working for others.
- Then run your own tests to see if you can improve on this.
A main purpose of nearly all websites is to get as much exposure as possible. The way to minimise your effort in setting your site up to improve success, is to copy what successful internet marketers do.