Latest News > October 2007

5 Steps to a Great Web Presence
By CHITS UK

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the food was good, but the service was so terrible you vowed never to go back? Perhaps the waiters or waitresses were slow and unresponsive; or the place didn’t look very clean; or the atmosphere was just depressing.

In any case, it was not the core business – the food – that lost customers; it was rather the environmental attributes – the look, the feel, and the functionality of the establishment. While we are all familiar with this experience offline, many of us are blind to the fact that often we create the same negativity in our company’s web presence.

How to Design Your Website to Maximize Profits

Having the greatest product to hit the web won’t make any difference if your potential customers experience so much trouble with your website that they turn to your competitors instead. Here are five steps to a great web presence that will help you encourage your website visitors to stick around and become paying customers:

1. Establish your website goals.

Before you can have a successful website, you need to take the time to determine what goals you are trying to accomplish with your web presence. Take the time to plan your site content, your structure and your overall design to fulfill your site goals.

2. Get the design right.

Nothing is more likely to discourage a potential customer than a website that looks as if was designed by amateurs. Invest in a professional designer who knows how to make a website look stunning – it will be worth every penny.

3. Create a user-friendly site visitor experience.

Having the information a visitor is looking for on your website won’t help you if the visitor can’t find it. Make sure your site structure and design are intuitive for your visitors and that they facilitate the process of finding the information visitors need. Also be sure to use persuasion architecture to keep your visitors on your site and moving toward your e-commerce goals.

4. Establish and implement a web-marketing plan.

Now that you have an attractive web presence that is ready and able to convert visitors into paying customers, the next step is to start bringing those visitors to your website. Consider appropriate marketing activities that will help you achieve your website goals and allocate a budget that will allow you to judge your success.

5. Set up a data-capture and customer-retention strategy.

Once you have visitors coming to your site, you want to track what brings you the most success in achieving your goals and encourage those people to become repeat visitors. To do this, you’ll need software that helps you evaluate your data and identify which marketing methods are the most successful, which pages and links drive your visitors deeper into the site, and why your visitors might be leaving without helping you complete your site goals. Also, you’ll want to encourage your visitors to leave personal information so you can use email marketing and other methods to contact them again and invite them to return to your site.

It’s worth taking the time to get your web presence right. Online businesses are expecting a growth of 41% over the next year, double that of their offline competitors. Following these five steps to create a strong web presence that encourages visitors to become paying customers can have a huge impact on your company’s profitability.

If you would like help making plans to update or develop your new website, please call 02082382401 or send us an enquiry.

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