How to make your website effective

The whole aim of this site is to help people build effective websites. But do you really know what an effective website is? Is is the design, the coding, the technology, the images, the copy? The answer is much simpler, an effective website is one that meets the customers needs. A visitor to a website is looking for information about products or services, to be entertained or to socialize. The layout, the colours, graphics and even the speed of loading are secondary to these needs.

To how can you make your website effective?

Knowing your visitors is the key to making your website effective. There is no point in creating a page on painting for dummies and loading it with technical information about paintbrushes. So for all websites you need to:

• Consider what you want the site to achieve.
• Determine who your prospective customers are.
• Create content that meets their needs.

Sounds simple but the process takes time to implement. Even working out what you want the site to achieve can be a problem. Do you want to sell cushions, cushion designs, patterns or cushion kits, offer advice, discuss techniques, run cushion courses? You can do all of these but only one can be the main focus of the site. People looking for cushion courses are not going to be interested in buying ready made cushions. Conversely somebody looking for designer cushions doesn’t really want so see a page of patterns.

The solution to making a site effective is planning. Before you rush to the computer to implement all the good advice you have researched stop and think. Will the changes help or hinder the visitor. Adding a search facility might seem a great idea but unless you have enough content to make the search worthwhile then the visitor will leave frustrated at the ‘0 results’ page.

Step back a little a do some analysis. Look at your visitor stats and see how long they stay, where they exit, which are popular pages and so on. Maybe do some user testing to find out how users interact with the site. Use a heat map to see where visitors click. Find out which parts of the site are rarely visited and make sure the links to these parts are obvious.

Look again at your page titles, headers, links, copy, images and be critical. Do they really help the visitor? Could you better describe the product? Is the checkout process simple? Are your contact details prominent on every page? Do not rest on your laurels, review each page regularly to make sure the information is still valid and up to date. Check your external links, use a search engine to find your site to see what your potential visitors see.

The list is endless. It’s not difficult, just time consuming. But like any other business enterprise you need to put the hours in if you want to be effective.