The 4 Pillars of a Successful Website
There are four areas that your website must excel at when you're doing business online. These are the pillars of your website and without them your website will come crashing down.
So let's talk about:
- Design,
- Usability,
- Findability, (yes, I invented a word!)
- and Functionality.
1. Design
If your website doesn't look professional and trustworthy you can kiss visitors goodbye right from the start.
Everything about your website is building a relationship with the visitor and the design is a big component of that.
If your website doesn't look professional...
...they won't think you can do the job.
Professional is not about having stock images of important looking business people. It's about looking like you have the ability to get the job done.
If your plumber showed up in a business suit. Would he appear professional to you? No, because he doesn't look equipped to get the job done.
If your website doesn't look trustworthy...
...you don't look trustworthy.
Do you seem like someone that is giving good advice, or just out to make some quick cash? Ask yourself how much you trust a salesperson. They have a reputation, don't they? In your face, always selling, always after your money.
Now picture a tradesman you trust. The person you call when things go wrong and they always solve your problem. You trust their advice and take to heart their recommendations.
Now who would you prefer your website to behave like?
Design is your first pillar to get just right. And as you'll learn, there's more to great design than something that looks slick and polished. Design communicates a message to your visitor. What does your message say?
Usability
Is your website easy-to-use? You may be able to find your way around it, but can your visitors? Can your grandmother? Can she find the information she wants?
Do you guide your visitors around your website? Do you point them in the direction of the right information when they need it?
Your website must be ordered in a nice, easy to follow, and logical way. Menu systems should be abundant on your pages and easy to use. And make it fast to load, these days visitors have very little patience.
Usability is the second pillar of a successful website. There's no point having a website with loads of great information and products if no one can use it.
Findability
To use an ancient Chinese proverb: "If you build a business in the forest and no one is around to visit it, does it make a sale?"
Welcome to the Internet, now your shop front is down a back alley with a million or so others. So how will people find your website?
Marketing is a skill that cannot be overlooked on the Internet. Stores in the physical world seem to get by with their ad in the phonebook and walk-in traffic, but the Internet doesn't work like that.
So how do you market a website? The first thing you need is, of course, your marketing strategy. A plan... There are a million activities that you can do online and it's important you're not wasting your time.
But remember not to focus on the activities. A lot of people start doing marketing activities and call it marketing. It's like a small business owner starting a direct mail campaign out of the blue. I'm glad they're doing something, but they're approaching it completely the wrong way.
Findability is the third pillar. If you want to save your time and money you need to dive deeper into 'what is marketing?' First the strategy, then the techniques.
Functionality
Your website has an objective, so what is it? What do you hope to achieve with your website? And how will you know when it's achieved?
Some examples of objectives are:
> Buy my product or service
> Contact me
> Sign up for my newsletter
> Visit again
> Contribute to my website (perhaps a forum)
When you decide on the objective, set a goal for it.
Eg. 10 sales from the website in January.
Now, look at each one of your pages and see how they are supporting this goal.
I hope you're not trying to sell on your homepage, so what do you do? Perhaps...start building trust? So your objective becomes getting the visitor to click through to the next page. And the goal becomes the percentage of people that click.
You see how this works? And how it supports the usability by guiding your visitor around the website as well?
Measure the Results!
You'll quickly realise that you should be measuring these important website statistics. Normally, your web hosting will come with a standard statistics package that will tell you some of this information.
The chances are, you don't even know it exists... Am I right? Google analytics is also a free system you can use to analyse your website traffic.
You can also purchase statistics packages that offer you a much better view of how your website is doing. I personally use multiple packages to give me the full picture. But simply looking at a few statistics is the starting point.
So the fourth and final pillar is Functionality. Does your website achieve what you want it too? Or do you even know exactly what that is?
So there you have the four pillars of a successful website. I hope you found them enlightening and useful. Of course your website doesn't improve without action...so here are a few steps to get you started.
Time for Action!
Design - Start asking people what they think about your website. The more detail and criticism they give, the better. What words would they use to describe it? Are these the words you want them to use?
Usability - Give your website to some people that don't know it very well. Then sit behind them and watch them use it. Ask them to find specific information. Ask them to make a purchase. You'll be amazed how this will open your eyes.
Findability - Go to google and type in some keywords to try and find your website. (hint: change the 'preferences' to view 100 pages at a time) Do you even feature in the first 100 results?
Find out if you have website statistics already. How many people are visiting your website now? Where are they coming from?
Functionality - Start writing down your objectives. Start writing down your goals. Where are you now? Where do you want to be in 3 months? Then 6 months? 1 year?
Visit each page and think to yourself, "if I was a visitor, where would I go next? Where should I go next?" and make sure you keep sending them to useful pages.
Awww...I have to do stuff?
If this sounds like too much hard work, if you just wanted a get rich quick scheme, or if you're just plain lazy...you should try somewhere else.
If you found this information useful and can't wait to get started, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you found out from the above steps and don't be afraid to ask questions. You can post comments on my blog, sign up for the mailing list, or use the website.
