A successful website in 5 steps
Here at Starfish we've come up with 5 new year's resolutions to help you (or you clients) get the most from your website.
1. Make a good first impression
The web is such a competitive market place nowadays that a bad website can be worse than having no website at all. If users don't like what they see they'll navigate to one of your competitor's websites and they won't be back in a hurry. Internet users are more savvy than ever and if your website doesn't look up to scratch, customers will remember you for all the wrong reasons. The new year is the perfect time for a redesign.
2. Promote your website
A website without promotion is about as useful as printing a stack of leaflets and leaving them in your desk drawer. Promotion doesn't necessarily mean spending hundreds of pounds on adverts - put the URL on all your stationary, if you have a shop then display the website address so that passers by can see it without stopping, run exclusive offers from your website to encourage repeat business and most importantly tell people about your website - if you don't, who will?
3. Update your website
Ever find a website that you love but every time you go back it's exactly the same? Pretty soon you'll stop going back because you know it will never change. Web users like to be stimulated with new content. It could be something as simple as adding a news section to the home page or you could go to the next level and add a business blog to your website - many larger organisations are using these blogs as a more personal method of keeping in contact with their core customer base.
4. Do not hide your best bits
Every website should have a goal, and this goal should be clear to your customer. If the purpose of your website is to get people to sign up to your newsletter then there's no point in hiding the registration form on the contact page - display it proudly on the home page.
5. Monitor your website's performance
To make a success of your website you need to know how people are using it. If you don't know how many people are visiting your site or what products/pages are most popular then how do you know if your website is working for you? Nowadays there are free packages that track your website's performance. Google Analytics is one of the best and it's free. Use it to see what's working and what's not on your website.
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