7 Steps for Building a Business-Winning Website
- Define the most important action that you want the audience to take. Is it filling in an enquiry form? Call your toll free number? Download an information pack?
- Make it dead easy for them to take that action
- Ensure your code is search engine friendly:
- Clean urls like “this-is-a-page-about-how-to-do-stuff.html” rather than “index.php?ss=2&s=abc”
- Clean html code, eg use H1, H2, H3 tags instead of heavily formatted paragraph tags
- A stripped down CMS for commonly updated content (like blog entries, articles, products). Lock down other pages so you’re not tempted to wreck them with crazy fonts and colours
- “Write for the web” by formatting all your content with headings, sub-headings, short paragraphs (none more than 3 sentences), bullet points, numbered lists, and internal hyperlinks
- Follow usability guidelines, such as:
- Hyperlinks that look link hyperlinks. Buttons that look like buttons
- Breadcrumbs so when the users deep-link they can quickly figure out where they are
- Disable the hyperlink in the navigation if the user is already on that page
- And just about everything else website usability guru Jacob Nielsen recommends
- Choose a web site developer who knows about all this stuff
Other Important Things
- Ensure all your navigation is in one place (preferably displayed vertically on the left so it can scale as your website grows)
- Don’t have any animation or moving images at all. It distracts the user from completing their task