Insider tips to getting your website right

Know your website's goal

This is absolutely crucial if your website is to play any sort of a role in your marketing activities. Once you've defined it, that goal must then inform every single part of your website. Without the goal your website is in danger of just becoming a presence or brochure site, which is fine if that is your goal, but if you really want your website to support your marketing strategy it needs to work hard for you and knowing what you want to achieve out of it is crucial.

What's in it for me?

Honestly, we can't say this enough! Your website visitor is not on your site for you, they are visiting you for themselves! So give them something they want to see. Inform them, surprise them, amuse them, educate them, solve their problems, meet their needs, whatever you do, think about them first.

Collect email addresses

This one is critical in terms of using your website as a marketing tool. There are many ways to collect email addresses but you'd be surprised how many websites don't do it at all. If visitors volunteer their contact details to you it means that you have their permission to communicate with them in the future ... for free.

Give for free!

And don't just give a little, give a lot, and give really good stuff too. It engenders trust in your readers; if you keep adding good stuff it keeps people coming back to your site for more; it establishes the beginning of ‘the relationship’ between you and your potential customers.

Build your website with SEO at its core

Optimising your website for search engines can be a massive task and it is an ongoing one, but there are some basic things you can do that will help the search engines 'find' your website when they are asked to. Use text titles and not images; make sure each of your web pages has its own title, description and keywords; implement a linking strategy so you're getting inbound links to your website; make sure all images carry alt tags; use html text coding rather than flash and image pages, and add lots and lots of content - these are just some of the things that contribute to an optimised website. Without optimisation your site is just another site amongst millions, with it your site stands a far better chance of being found by those people who are looking for what you offer.

Remember the 8 second rule

You have only 8 seconds to capture the attention of your website visitor. Make sure your most critical message is noticable in that timeframe. And don't ever waste your 8 second window on website 'loading' pages (you know the type, the moving ones that give you a countdown or percentage loading information before the main website appears). By the time these pages have finished loading your potential customer has long since surfed onto websites new...

Maximise your website's 'sweet spots'

People read web pages differently to how they read a book or document (they don’t call it surfing for nothing!).  Try to keep your paragraphs short, use bulleted lists and differently formatted headings so they stand out, avoid full screen sites which often make the reading line too long to skim, and only put a logo in the top left corner of your website if it very specifically makes it immediately clear what it is you do.