How do I Build a Successful Website?

Website Success Strategy

Building a successful website is not as straightforward as it may look. There are many elements experts take into consideration and these will vary from project to project. Before you start building a website always have clear goals, a strategy, and a user journey map, this will help you achieve greater success and ultimately will help you build a stronger more successful website.

The hints and tips in this article are intended to help you understand how to build a successful website, when you apply these strategies correctly it will support your business and help you to become more successful.

What are your website goals?

When you build a website, the first thing you should do is to find the answers to questions such as “What are our goals?”, “What do we want to achieve with this website?” and “How will a website work best for our Business?”A common mistake many companies make is to skip the planning stage, often moving directly to the design stage to save time. If you aren’t sure exactly what you want to achieve, how will your website make a positive impact?

Tips on setting website goals:

  • The purpose of your website should help you reach your business goals
  • The website you develop should support your companies mission.
  • Don’t be afraid to make your goal specific – if you would like “50% of your new business to come through the contact forms on your website” then make that your goal. A good web designer will work with you to show you how you can use design to influence user actions.
  • Look at your competition. Conducting competitor research can be useful. Compare what they do well and consider ways in which you could improve things on your website. You can use the competition as a benchmark and use it to help you set your goals – for example, “I would like to rank higher in search than this company when people use these key search terms”

Define your digital marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy helps you to make grounded decisions, it sets the tone for all of your on and offline marketing activities. When you understand what you expect to get out of your website and understand how to drive the right people to your website—it will help you to work towards the goals that you have already set.

Here are a few tips that help you start planning your strategy:

  • Define the website’s purpose 
  • The purpose of your website should support the company’s mission and make the business more effective in achieving that mission.
  • Make your digital strategy specific
  • Instead of “I want to have a strong online presence,” consider being more specific: “Our goal is to have 50% of all of our orders submitted online, not over the phone.”
  • Conduct competitor research
  • List sites of your competitors which you find successful, and try to pinpoint why they are successful. Create your strategy in line with theirs, but aim to do things better.

Who is your user?

If you understand who your user is, you will have greater success with your website. Ultimately visitors determine the success of a website, the website should be focused on their needs and your business goals.

When you build your website, try to understand what content they might need or want, what their browsing habits are (how they prefer to interact with a website), and think about their typical level of technical ability. A website is not successful if the users can’t find it, or if they can’t understand how to use it.

Users are essential, you can consider them by

  • Thinking about the goals, what do you want visitors to do?
    • Place an order?
    • Should they contact you for a quote?
    • Do they need to become a member?
  • Create or define your user journey
    If you have an existing site, you can figure out typical ways people use it by using analytics to create detailed user journey maps. In doing this you will gain vast amounts of insights into how a user behaves on your existing site – from this you can make developments to refine the user journey. If you are fresh of the starting blocks and need to create your first user journey then you can do so by carefully considering your user and the journey they take from considering and researching to finally booking or contacting.

How successful is your website?

Did you know that there are more than 1.8 billion websites on the Internet right now? That means there’s plenty of digital competition.

Does your website, generate revenue for your business?

  • Helps you grow your business

  • Generates enquiries

  • Attracts new customers

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