You cannot simply throw together a business website and expect it to be successful. Successful business websites are well thought out and involve meticulous planning of such elements as the design, registration and hosting. What follows are a few critical elements for planning a professional looking successful website intended to help you create an effective website for your business.
Designing a Successful Business Website
The first real step towards designing a successful business website is to perform a background study; review the demographics of prospective customers and develop a business concept. A business concept enables you to clearly identify the services or goods you will feature on your site. Look into market demand for your goods and services; are they already in demand or will you need to develop a market for them. Demographic research will help determine which segment of the market is most likely to afford and buy what is offered on your website. Be sure to look at what your competition is doing to attract buyers; pick and choose what features you like best.
It is very important to consider buyer preferences in your website design; after all it is visits converted to sales that drive online business. Sites that make it easy for visitors to find and buy what they want are obviously the most successful. Spend some time learning what your targeted market prefers; is it common in your business market to include a large amount of graphics or does your market commonly prefer text? Short download times are preferred by all markets; it is generally a bad idea to overload a site with photos and graphics that bog download times and drive away business.
Plan your website to be search engine friendly. SEO is crucial to high rankings and driving traffic to your site. The more traffic a website attracts the more likely it is that revenue generation will increase.
Customize your website for the maximum effect on buyers. Every visitor to your site ought to feel like it was designed expressly for them. Copying from a template makes your site look “cookie cutter” and lacking in personality; customize to please your market.
Easy navigation is critical to a successful business website. If navigation is complex and confusing visitors are very apt to simply click away to the competition. Content placement is the key to making any website easy to read and comprehend, place your products and services where they are easily spotted by all visitors.
It commonly takes a minimum of 30 days for a website to be designed and implemented. It might take even longer if you are to track and optimize online sales. The most common methodology used to tweak and optimize your online campaigns is the A/B testing. Running an A/B test involves creating a different version of a web page and compare its performance against the current version. This might let you ask the necessary questions about the changes to your website or sales page need, and then collect data about the impact of that change.
Such A/B testing removes the guesswork out of optimizing your website and enables data-driven decisions. In other words it changes a website optimization decision based on “we think” to “we know.” By measuring and analyzing the web metrics and analytics, you can ensure that every change produces positive results. You can change the entire outlook of a page to made a simple change like tweaking the headline or button. Send a part of your traffic to original version and another part to the new version. By measuring the performance of both versions, you can arrive at the optimum design. Good web designers and digital marketing experts can not only design a good website, but also devise and run an A/B testing for you
