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Building Your Own Website

So you’ve decided you want a website for your business, or maybe you’re not happy with the results you’re getting from your current site.

Building and maintaining a welcoming, useful and engaging website, that meets your customers’ needs and achieves your business objectives is a considerable undertaking. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the task and not know where to start.

Take some time out to plan what you want from your website and what you realistically expect it to achieve. The clearer you can be about your objectives for the site, the easier you’ll find the rest of the process, regardless of whether you do it yourself or get in outside help.

The following five steps will help ensure that your website actually works and helps to grow your business.

1. Focus on your business goals

The vast majority of small businesses don’t have a clear idea about what they want from their website. And without a clear purpose in mind, most websites lack direction and fail to achieve anything at all.

Imagine your website is an employee (after all it should be working for you!) and try writing a job description for the site, or giving it an appraisal. Which department is it based in? What tasks do you want it to perform? How do you want it to appear and greet people? What impression of your company do you want it to create?

Now review the site (or your plan) with those priorities in mind. Be practical here and think about the rest of your sales and marketing processes. If you normally close deals with your customers after three meetings and an hour long presentation, it’s not realistic to expect your website to start selling directly for you.

2. Identify your “most wanted response”

In other words, define the number one thing you want each visitor to the site to do. This needs to be specific, pragmatic and – most important of all – relevant to your overall sales and marketing process. The level of response can range from simply visiting a specific page, through to more “visible” responses such as registering contact details, calling your company or making a purchase.

If you’re looking for a highly visible level of response (such as contacting the company) try to make this as easy, risk-free and desirable as possible. Provide tangible email address (avoiding the anonymity of sales@...) and, if possible, provide a toll-free number for visitors to call your company.

Be very specific in the language you use. Rather than “call for more information”, try something like “call and ask for our information pack on XYZ” or “call now and we can tell you in five minutes if your company could save money with ABC”.

If it’s feasible, have something of value that you can give away to encourage visitors to respond (such as a report or a trial offer). A free telephone consultation can be useful, although this needs to be structured so that it doesn’t appear to be a disguised sales call.

Whatever type of action you identify as being the most important, make sure that the content and the design of your site, and in particular your home page, are all structured to encourage this response.

3. How easy is your website to use?

If you already have a website this step is vital. It doesn’t matter how much you like your site if no-one else can use it effectively.

Make a list of the different tasks your site allows visitors to do (for example, make an enquiry, buy a product, or provide feedback). Now get a friend who doesn’t know the site to try and carry out the tasks. Watch what they try to do and make a note anywhere they get stuck or frustrated.

If you’re planning a website, consider what tasks you want your site to provide. Think about whether or not your website is being “helpful” enough – are you proactively encouraging prospects to get in touch and to try out your services (or buy your products), or does your site just say “take it or leave it”? The right functionality will remove the barriers between you and your customers and make it easy for you to start and build a productive relationship.

4. Plan your content

Content is too often overlooked when it comes to website creation, with all the attention going to design. And although design is important, this is definitely the wrong way around! While bad design can sink a website, good design is not enough to save one! People use the web for information and solutions, so make sure your content talks directly to your customers about their problems.

Whether you’re promoting services or directly selling products, every potential customer or prospect wants to know “what’s in it for me” – so your content has to answer this question. This is easiest if you focus on the benefits of doing business with you, rather than the features of what you offer. When you come to write the content for your website, avoid using jargon and make it as easy as possible for visitors to your website to understand what you do and how you help. Be enthusiastic and passionate about what you offer – you want to excite prospective customers and encourage them to do business with you, so avoid dull and dry language.

5. Surf the web

Spend a bit of time looking at other sites - including your competitors’ and suppliers’ sites, as well as popular brands and news and information sites. Keep a note of what you do and don’t like about the sites you visit – then review your own site. Are you making any of the same mistakes? Could your site benefit from the ideas you’ve seen elsewhere?

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