Needless to say, websites are like oxygen for your business. In an information era like the one we live, does your website have what it takes for business success? What does your website need to cut through the clutter and come out shining like a star?
Personality:
If you were you expecting something more technical — see where we all go wrong? Your website needs a soul; a personality; a character; a strong brand presence which is only possible if every word adds to the glamor; contributes to the hidden identity of the website and strikes a strong chord with the reader. Your website ought to be almost like a human being; cajoling, conniving, pampering and persuading your reader. What’s the best thing your website can be? A little kid clamoring for attention, and persuasively at that!
SEO Optimized?
That doesn’t impress me much: Getting your website SEO optimized by even the world’s greatest or most expensive SEO company ( if there is one! ) isn’t going to get you what you want — brand image, sales, click through or whatever it is that you are looking for. Your customer doesn’t give a damn about these above mentioned services that you pay a bomb for — all she wants is information and real quick at that. You don’t have it or can’t provide it quickly enough, you have lost it. Just providing information quickly also won’t cut the ice just as yet, since the information you provide has to be succinct, brief, clear and unambiguous. The more products and services you have, the more you will have to focus your information and segregate it accordingly. Your links have to be clear, easily found and most importantly - they should work.
Speak my language, Buddy:
No matter what you do with your website and even if you spent a million dollars on its design, it won’t fetch you a single dollar if you sound high and mighty or too corporate. Like mentioned before, your website should have a life of its own. Once you have a website up and running, your site should represent you — a human being ( as much as it can). Depending on what kind of services and products you might be selling, you should be able to ascertain who your target customer is going to be and once that is done, you got to understand what they really want and then give it to them as they were these little kids who won’t stop wailing until you give them a ton of Hershey bars. To know your market better, you could conduct a survey; ask your present clientèle; generalize and understand them better from available information. There is no excuse to not knowing whom you are doing business with.
Your Identity Please:
Not having your contact information online is the dumbest thing you can do with respect to any literature or promotional material that tumbles out of your desk and websites are no exception. The thing about websites is that they are up and running 24/7, 365 and forever (or at least until your business lasts) and people always have to ask questions, get more information about whatever it is that you do with your website; they have to ask you a thousand questions and think for a month before they make their sale and that means that you got to have your contact information up there on your site. Was it Obvious? Do a search and see how much of contact information you can gather right now. You’d be surprised.
Content, with a consistent Design:
Now, your website should be a patch-work, obviously and must have a consistent design with uniformity in colors, fonts, text size and link colors. More importantly, it should have fresh content that gets uploaded frequently. Don’t even think of a website if you didn’t know what to fill your website with. Period.
Tags: business success, website design
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April 28th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I agree with you. Sites need personality. If a site is just blah why would people continue to look at the site. I think a website should be a representation of you. If you are loud and exciting, your site should represent that.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Your site needs to be sticky - and so much of that comes from the personality of your site and the language you use. Good call! SEO is all well and good but if you can’t keep visitors on your site once they find you and create a relationship, you are wasting your time.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Thank you for the good advice above - I’m just starting out on designing a website and have been doing my own research on which sites appeal the most and why. I’ve found that looking careful design of the layout and ease of accessibility to different sections definitely wins brownie points. It’ll make your readers come back for more and encourages them to manouvre their way round - maybe even buy your services - at the end of the day that’s what matters most.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:21 am
That’s definitely good to know, all this time I thought the important thing for your site to succeed is SEO and good content. I didn’t know about the importance of the image of the site. I’ve placed an e-mail add for them to contact me but I think I still have a lot of work to do to improve my site.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:13 pm
My take is that a good website must have good and updated content and sensible navigation and not-too heavy graphics. Other elements such as audio and visual stuff should be kept to a minimum or allow users to activate or disable the feature. Ad placement should be discrete and not too many ads in a single page.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:37 am
This is the same thing that John Chow has said in one of his posting but in his own words. He has said that we need to expose ourselves a little bit by posting our picture on our sites. I’m having doubts about this since there are some people online that want to use our identity for criminal stuff. I think that I won’t expose myself because I’m afraid of the bad guys.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
In regard to that comment about posting a picture of yourself, I think it completely depends on what your goal is for the site. A lot of performers, artists, and musicians have web sites to promote their art. And most of them have at least small pictures because everybody wants to know what the person looks like who’s playing the music or painting the picture.
If you’re promoting something else on your site, you have to think about whether people will be more likely to buy if they see your picture.
May 5th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I think the most important thing is fresh useful content. Our blog readers expect up to date information so we use rss feeds to keep our content fresh plus the added bonus is we don’t have to update the blog every day by ourselves. To make the rss content interesting and easy to read, it is still necessary for us to rearrange the content layout to best match the design of our blog. This is a relatively a small amount of effort considering the great wealth of content we gain from using rss feeds.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:47 am
I believe in speaking on ones language because the readers that you will get are those ones that have the same likings. This is what you call as niche. This is a good way to get someone interested on your site. If you don’t have any niche market then you will never have some readers frequenting your site.
May 10th, 2008 at 5:31 am
Very interesting perspectives! It makes perfect sense. Even if a site has all it takes to keep people coming back to squeeze out useful information, they wouldn’t reciprocate unless they can relate to a person behind the screen. Having an identity that visitors can relate to is perhaps as important as search engine optimization because SEO will get your site relevant traffic but it’s up to your website to convert that traffic into repeat visitors.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:56 am
“it won’t fetch you a single dollar if you sound high and mighty or too corporate. ”
True- but let’s not forget those websites on the other end of the spectrum, either, that are littered with netspeak. Ugh, that’s even worse. I, and most people, frankly don’t want to hand over money to a site peppered with spelling errors and slang.
“Identity, please” - this is another thing that drives me insane on some websites. It’s incredibly frustrating being unable to contact the company when you need to. In fact, this should be of top priority for any business; make sure you have easy to access contact information.
June 21st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
You know one thing is that the elements mentioned are very important. But just because one person thinks a site might have what it takes in the area of personality or identity it does not mean that everyone else will think the same way. I think that each type of site needs to determine what the goal is and how to best achieve that goal with design, marketing, content and all other elements.