Priorities For A Successful Website

Priority #1:  Know Your Audience
Before you build anything, spend some time thinking about who your website audience really is.  This is going to determine many things about your website:  keywords, content, the design, navigation, relevant links, and more.  In order for your website to perfectly fulfill its purpose, you need to know who it’s intended for, and create the website to match the visitors coming to your site.

Are your website visitors:

• prospective customers or clients?
• your current customers?
• buyers?
• employees?
• who else?

Priority #2:  Fulfill Your Site’s Purpose Easily
Now that you know who your audience is, you can figure out what the main purpose of your site is.  If it is prospective customers or buyers, your focus should be on showing your product or service in a very attractive way.  If it’s current customers, you need to allow them access to their information easily and quickly.  So many people make the mistake of creating their website the way THEY like it – which is not necessarily the way the visitors like it.  Think about what it is about your site that is going to make it EASIEST for your intended audience to get what they came for out of your website.

Priority #3:  Simple & Consistent Navigation
There is nothing worse than going to a site and not being able to find your way around easily.  Everything (yes, EVERYTHING) on your site should be quick and easy to find.  The navigation links should be obvious, it should be clear where they each lead, and everything should only be a click (or two) away.  The navigation area should also be consistent – it should be in the same place on every page.  No matter where the person is on your site, it will be easy to get anywhere else on the site because they know right where to click.  Make it easy for them.

Priority #4:  Keep It Dynamic
Have you ever visited a website, only to see the exact same homepage every time you visit?  Your website is not a static brochure (although many businesses use it as such).  Your website should be dynamic, vibrant, changing, fresh, and new!  Do this by updating the content and images on your homepage often.  Even if it’s only once a month.  Don’t change the whole look & feel of your site (that’s important to maintain brand identity).  Just give people something new to read, new pictures to look at.  A reason to keep them coming back.  A desire to learn something new.  After all, you’re the expert in your field, whatever that is, right?  Provide tips, articles, answers.

Priority #5:  SEO & Marketing
Your website designer or webmaster might know more about this than you.  Just make sure your website was created in such a way that it is optimized for the search engines to find it and index it (hence “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO).  There are many technical things that your programmer needs to do to make it easy for people to find your site.  Such as keyword optimization, inserting metatag information, using CSS compliant layouts, and much more.  SEO is just part of marketing your website.  There are many other ways to market:  online advertising (such as banner ads or pay-per-click), blogging (& other social networking), linking with other websites, and more.

Priority #6:  Make It Beautiful
You’d think this would be #1, wouldn’t you?  Being a designer I would love this to be #1.  But the reality is there are some pretty darn ugly sites out there that aren’t very user-friendly, but they are highly successful because they provide what people are looking for (certain products, services, or information).  But once you have a site that is fulfilling its purpose – make it look beautiful.  Make it so people really enjoy visiting your site.  Make it simple.  Clean.  Organized.  Use a color scheme that works for your business.  Have a design that draws people in to the content it surrounds.