10 Steps to a Great Business Website

By Julie King | August 31, 2003

Define your business goals. Determine the results that you want your website to produce. Then build your website to meet your business goals. Pay close attention to how the site will generate revenue and/or decrease costs.

Your customers are the vehicle that will enable you to reach your goals. Be sure to build your website for them.

Forget about using fancy splash pages and animations to introduce your website. Minimalist, intuitive design and clear communication are what really count.

Don't make your customers think; that's your job. Do make it easy for them to find what they are looking for on your website, without getting lost in the process.

Don't be obscure. Elaborate graphics and “mystery meat” navigation experiments are best left for personal projects.

Give your customers the detailed information they are looking for. This is easier in theory than it is in practice, as it is often hard work to put together detailed information, with photos if applicable, on your products and services.

The copy on your website is extremely important. Keep it direct, short, and clear. You need to say enough that your customers understand your message, but if you are too wordy or use emotive languages you will reduce the likelihood of a) visitors reading it and b) visitors believing it once they have read it.

Include a call to action on each page.

The search engines really do count; optimize your site for optimal placement.

Track the success of your website, and adjust accordingly!

Strange but true â€¦
According to Jared Spool, who studies how users interact with websites, a user's perception of page-load time correlates not to the actual time it takes pages to load, but rather to the ability of the user to achieve their goal on a website.

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