What makes a website successful? If youve ever asked yourself this question, youre not alone there are many people who wonder what makes a website successful.
There are many components of a successful website. Here are just 7;
- Content
Although debated by some whether or not content is important. If youre selling suits online, you need to educate your customers why your suits are the best. If youre selling train tickets online you optimise content to increase people to buy the tickets content is still king in my book. - Search Engine Readiness
Making your website easy for search engines to trawl, record and utilise your site. The ranking and optimisation of content and keywords for search engine readiness is one of the corner-points of a successful website. - Customers
If you dont have visitors and prospective customers then your website and business is suffering and you need to promote the site more effectively. - Communication
What does your website communicate to your audience? What should it look like to help communicate the website better? - Metrics
How are you measuring the success of your website? Forget about hits. Concentrate on page views, unique page views, subscribers, returning subscribers, number of purchases, number of sales, and number of clicks on article/e-zine. If you’re website is making you money you can help improve your website by concentrating on 1 or 2 things you are interested in measuring, recording it every week and then evaluating it every month. Remember to ask yourself how can I improve the numbers coming to my website? - Promotion
How are you promoting the website? If you are not promoting the website, this may be the cause for your lack of website success. You need to promote your website everywhere, anywhere, and anyhow. Combine traditional marketing with online promotions. Use promotion to help attract prospects and turn them into customers. Use promotion to help turn customers into loyal ones - Purpose
What is the purpose of your website? Is it to inform, and articulate debate? Is it to give customers a phone number to call? Do you want them to buy things from you? Knowing the purpose of your website is important because without it you may make critical mistakes that impact on its overall success
You may rank one thing higher than another. You might already be saying He forgot about X, Y and Z thats good. It means that youre thinking seriously about the success of your website and how to improve it.
Now get a pen, a piece of paper and write the things you feel are important for the success of your website, then ask your web designer hard questions regarding each part.
These answers will then help you focus your mind on how to improve your website even more!