posted by Philip Harman on Jan 16
As a website designer and developer I have noticed that every client without exception wants their website to be successful. But not all clients act as though they do.
Website success is of course relative to what you want to accomplish – great sales, subscriptions, large volume of downloads, huge readership, increasing traffic etc. but generally speaking the higher the number of repeat visitors to your site, the more successful your website is likely to be considered.
However, I have also observed that many clients seem to believe that they have an idea for a killer website which once built will bring them instant and automatic success – with riches following shortly after.
Many people also seem to believe that the job of their website designer is to not only bring their website to life but also to nurture it to success – at no additional cost. And that if the website fails to produce the result expected, it must be the fault of the designer for not building it properly, not making it attractive enough etc.
The truth is that for your website to succeed, you the owner will need to invest a great deal of time, effort and energy in making it work. Your web designer does have a duty to make it attractive, quick loading, and optimise it in various ways – depending on how much you are willing to pay. But you will in the long term need to put in a tremendous amount of work, dedication and passion.
Why do you need this? Because there is likely to be a tremendous amount of competition for the same audience you are targeting. So you need to work hard to make your website better than your competitors within the scope of your limited budget. Fortunately, you don’t need that much money as competition working in your favour means that you can purchase a lot of digital products for your site at minimal cost.
For your website based business to be successful, you will need to treat it with the same degree of seriousness you would treat a physical non-online business i.e. you get up and go to work on your business each day. Check and respond to your mail, orders etc. i.e. you spend every day building and improving your business, researching trends, locating resources, adding value to it, contacting your valued clients, preparing great offers, thinking of and seeking ways to beat your competition.
Since websites are media portals, a good way of understanding your job is to assign yourself the role of Owner/Editor as if it were a top notch magazine competing with the likes of Time Magazine, Newsweek, Hello or OK magazine.
What strategy and focus would you need to use to make your magazine succeed and out strip your competition? Your ability to obtain and maintain readership (website traffic) will be determined by how much better and useful you can make your site than those of your competitors.
While your website’s designers do have an important role to play in terms of presenting your content in an attractive format, without you providing good content to support that layout, all your effort will prove useless. Functionality will often triumph over layout – as Google has proved by outpacing AOL, MSN and Yahoo to become the premier search engine by providing few other features than the ability to deliver good and relevant content.
So once you have a chosen a good layout, what should you the as the editor be doing
· Seeking and developing content, lots of content for your website. Search engines love content.
· Seeking fresh, new content i.e. your sites content should be changing all the time. Would you buy the same newspaper twice? No? Then why should you expect visitors to return if your website remains the same week after week. It must be dynamic.
· Keeping abreast with trends in your industry and informing your readers.
· Tweaking your layout occasionally. Change is good if not done too often
· Seeking out valuable, important and useful information and resources for your readers.
· Revenue – you should be finding ways to generate revenue from your site. Yes you are also the marketing manager, accountant and financial wizard. So what can you sell on your website, what can you advertise that will be relevant to your clients.
· Developing services or products you can get people to sign up to or subscribe for. Add value to your website regularly. Always be on the lookout for products you can offer.
· Seeking syndication and wider distribution channels. In terms of the web, represented by incoming links and syndicated articles. Publishing excellent articles which link back to your website will attract much needed attention to your site.
Basically to make your website succeed, rather than seeking to make revenue generation your primary goal, seek to make your site the best possible website resource for visitors in your field. Become passionately driven for your website to become the most excellent in your area of expertise.
If you do all the things listed above you will not only succeed in getting top search engine positions, you will also gain large volumes of web traffic and revenue will follow.
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