What Does Your Website Do For You?

Building a Website is only the first stage on the path to e-business success

When developing your website, whether for redesign or for a brand new site, you should understand what it is you wish your site to achieve so that you can have the maximum input into the development of your website. By developing the goals for your website; in terms of design, optimization and marketing, you can plan more effectively and have a coherent strategy for your interent business from day one.

What do you want your site to do for you?

Every website is unique and you should set out your goals for the site in terms of its purpose. Is you site to :

  • Sell products and/or services to online consumers? Such as is the case for Haven Holidays
  • Sell products and/or services to other online businesses? Usually the case with niche market providers such as SEO, or web design sites such as Equator Media
  • To generate enquiries for an offline business? An example of this type can be found at A1 Mobility
  • Give information on a particular subject?
  • Develop affiliate reslling?

Who is your target market?

Having developed the 'what' of your site the next thing is the 'who'. This means considering your target market and developing your site towards them. The modern economy is littered with examples of great products who were pitched at the wrong market and failed as a result.

  • Do you have a geographic target market?
  • Do the products, services or information you provide have a specific age group?
  • Does the cost of the product or service mean that your prospective clients have a particular age range in mind?
  • Is the product / service niche or mass market?
  • Is there a social segment you wish to target?

How do the others in your market present themselves to clients?

Websites are a fantastic medium for selling however every site should be tailored to your market. If your market is young, trendy and affluent they will be looking for a particular style of website design. If the market is for 'budget' products the style will have to reflect this. By wen design style we are thinking about every aspect of your site; design, content style, navigation and logo are a few of these.

For example take a market such as web design some search terms may be 'web design scotland', 'cheap web design', 'flash web design' or 'optimized web design'. Each term has a particular style about it. The geographic focussed searcher wants a service in a specific area, the cost focussed searcher wants to know about cost not necessarily quality, the flash focussed searcher is looking for a specific type of web developer whereas the SEO focussed searcher is looking for a company who has a history is SEO and Web Design. By knowing what the client wants you can focuss your mind onto the design that others in your target market do from searching the search engines to get an overview of what the norms are, what do you like, what do you dislike.

Visitor Funneling?

Every website should have 'goals', where you want a particular type of user to arrive at. These can be for traffic driven from a search engine, or which pages you want them to navigate to. By understanding navigation and content on the web you can maximise the potential of people doing what you want them to do when they are inside your site

 

If you would like to discuss anything above or to arrange a free consultation simply email us.


List of Articles on Ethical Search Engine Optimization


: Hotel Industry Booking Study :: The Horror of Site Submit Pro :: What do you need from Your Site? :
: What is Page Rank? :: Page Rank is Dead - Myth or Reality :: The Replacement for Page Rank? :
: Latent Semantic Indexing :: Using Latent Semantic Indexing :: Robots.txt :
: Writing a robots.txt file :: Server Company Link Request :: Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content :
: Web Site Spiderability :: Big Daddy - the new face of Google :: Page Hijacking and 302 redirects :
: To Submit to Search Engines or not to Submit to Search Engines That is the Question? :: Know Your Customer to Know your User :: Black Hat SEO - Dont Do it! :
: April Fools in Search Engine Land :: Search Engines and Menus :: High Rankings - How do Search Engines fit into Your Business? :
: Google - Da Vinci Code the Game :: Removing the ODP description from your MSN listing :: Viewing the Google index from different Geographic Positions :
: Underused HTML Tags :: Company Law Amendment :

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