What qualities does a web site have to have?
What a web site needs to achieve in order to be successful can
be summarized in two paragraphs:
Putting the message across / Selling your product
Compare a web site to a shop. A shop has to be attractive when
you see it otherwise you will not walk in. Once you are inside,
the atmosphere needs to be pleasant otherwise you will not want
to spend time in it and will not be in the mood to appreciate the
products it offers. It is also important that the customer can find
easily what he or she is looking for otherwise they will go to another
shop.
A web site is the same: if the site is ugly, people will not want
to go in and have a look. They will get irritated by long download
times, flashing things and inappropriate music, They will get even
more irritated if they have difficulties finding what they are looking
for. In the end, it is maybe better to have no web site than to
have a badly designed one because a bad web site is giving the message:
“Look how unprofessional we are!”
In practical terms a web site needs to be user friendly, clear and
easy to navigate. It needs to present good information about your
product and make the visitor want to “buy” the product
or use your services.
Many web sites, possibly the majority, fail to do so.
Be easy to find
There are well over 20.000.000.000 web pages in the world. There
are hundreds of millions of web sites. This means that you have
to take some steps to make your web site known and easily found
by people looking for your product.
It is possible (and often advisable) to use judiciously placed paid
advertising on other related sites but the best way to make a web
site known is to obtain a good search engine placement in the major
search engines. And it is free!
Long gone are the days when simply registering a site would ensure
a good placement in a search engine. These were the days (until
about 10 years ago) when there were only a few competing sites and
you would be well placed no matter what your site looked like (to
a search engine which is absolutely not the same as what it looks
like to a human). People still think that having an appropriate
domain name and a list of keywords meta tags is enough. The truth
is that keyword tags are totally ignored by most search engines.
The strategies to get a good placement are now far far
more complex (whole books are written about it) and if you do not
use them, very few people will find your site. No visitors
= no internet business.
Search Engine Optimisation is a major consideration when we
create a new web site. We can also optimise your
existing site so that will achieve better rankings in search
results.
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