1. Your Website Goals
Define the goals of your website. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the website’s purpose. If you don’t have a clear picture what your website is about, how should your customers? Do you want to sell producs, provide information or use it for marketing purposes?
2. Your Domain Name
Choose an easy to remember domain name that’s easy to spell. People should associate your domain name with your company. That doesn’t mean creativity is a no-no. Here´s an example:
If your company’s name is Tony Miller Shirts and you sell T-Shirts online, tonymiller.com might not be the best of all domain names for you. Unless you have a strong brand associated with “Tony Miller”, nobody will care about tonymiller.com and domain names like millertshirts.com or tonysshirts.com could be a much stronger asset for your company.
3. Your Design
Desiging a website by oneself is possible, though unless you really know what you’re doing, give this job to someone who actually earns a living creating brilliantly designed websites. It’ll pay off in the long run. Make sure your designer understands what your business is about and communicate your ideas. Most importantly, let them do what they can do best: handle the designing part of your website. You will get a great design and will save time and troubles.
A great source for good and competitively-priced designers is Sortfolio.com.
4. Your Logo
In most instances you web designer will also be able to create an awesome looking logo for your company. Again, make sure to communicate your ideas and possibly send him self-made drafts until you have the feeling he truly understands what you’re looking for. Be careful, a logo is like your domain name. Your customers should identify your business with the logo every time they see it. Your logo should be uniform across all your marketing material, may it be your website or business cards, be sure it has exactly the same design and colours. Why? Take a look at CI.
5. Your Content
Tell your customers not what you want to sell. Tell them why they should buy your products and why you are better than your competitors. Be sure that all your content is easy to understand. Give you customers as many information as you can provide. Don’t forget to list your phone number, email address and also you business address for more credibility you may want to get a Better Business Bureau online seal as well.
6. Testing
Test your website. How long does it take to load? Are your pages W3C valid? You can test it here. Be vary about too many images. They may look great, but no visitor has the patience to wait until they’re all loaded. If you want to get fancy, be sure to think about visitors that do not have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player installed, and the folks that didn’t even download it in the first place.
7. Social Media
Integrate widgets in your website. Use Facebook, Twitter and co. to promote you website. If you have running a blog, connect it with Twitter and Facebook. Social Media is an ongoing project. Read the messages from your twitter friends and the wall posts of your Facebook page. Social Media means to communicate and to communicate regularly.
8. Feedback
Do you have a contact form on your website? Give your customers the chance to contact you without calling you. Why? Many people are interested in your products but are shy to ask their questions via phone.
9. Search Engines and SEO
Add your website to all popular search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google. Give every page of your website a specific title and add your keywords in headers and in your content. Use Bing Webmasters, Yahoo SiteExplore and Google Webmaster Tools. This tools will show you how “visible” (aka search engine friendly) your website is.
10. Analyse your website
Add an analysis software like Google Analytics or Piwik to your website. They’re both free. So you can control the visits on your site. These reports provide you with essential information like page views and visits per day, the countries of your visitors, the time and location of your visitors and much more.
If you want to know more about Social Business Bank visit http://www.socialbusinessbank.com.
Source: http://www.prlog.org/10552183-10-tips-thatll-make-your-website-more-successful.html
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