Does your Website Have What It takes?
Needless to say, websites like are oxygen for your business. Try and survive without it and you can just book your morgue. Thinking of an existence in an information thirsty era like the one we are living in without a website is akin to asking for your ticket to the game of doom. Just what is it that your website needs to have to cut through the clutter and come out shining like a star?
A Soul: If you were you expecting something more technical — see where we all go wrong? Your website needs a soul; a personality; a character; a strong brand presence which is only possible if every word adds to the glamour; contributes to the hidden identity of the website and strikes a strong chord with the reader. Your website ought to be almost like a human being; cajoling, conniving, pampering and persuading your reader. What’s the best thing your website can be? A little kid clamoring for attention, and persuasively at that!
SEO Optimized? That doesn’t impress me much: Getting your website SEO optimized by even the world’s greatest or most expensive SEM company ( if there is one! ) isn’t going to get you what you want — brand image, sales, click through or whatever it is that you are looking for. Your customer doesn’t give a damn about these above mentioned services that you pay a bomb for — all she wants is information and real quick at that. You don’t have it or can’t provide it quickly enough, you have lost it. Just providing information quickly also won’t cut the ice just as yet, since the information you provide has to be succinct, brief, clear and unambiguous. The more products and services you have, the more you will have to focus your information and segregate it accordingly. Your links have to be clear, easily found and most importantly – they should work.
Speak my language, buddy: No matter what you do with your website and even if you spent a million dollars on its design, it won’t fetch you a single dollar if you sound high-falutin or too corporate. Like mentioned before, your website should have a life of its own. Once you have a website up and running, your site should represent you — a human being ( as much as it can). Depending on what kind of services and products you might be selling, you should be able to ascertain who your target customer is going to be and once that is done, you got to understand what they really want and then give it to them as they were these little kids who won’t stop wailing until you give them a ton of Hershey bars. To know your market better, you could conduct a survey; ask your present clientele; generalize and understand them better from available information. There is no excuse to not knowing whom you are doing business with.
Your Identity Please: Not having your contact information online is the dumbest thing you can do with respect to any literature or promotional material that tumbles out of your desk and websites are no exception. The thing about websites is that they are up and running 24/7, 365 and forever (or at least until your business lasts) and people always have to ask questions, get more information about whatever it is that you do with your website; they have to ask you a thousand questions and think for a month before they make their sale and that means that you got to have your contact information up there on your site. Was it Obvious? Do a search and see how much of contact information you can gather right now. You’d be surprised!
Content, with a consistent & appealing design: Now, your website should be a patch-work, obviously and must have a consistent design with uniformity in colours, fonts, text size and link colours. More importantly, it should have fresh content that gets uploaded frequently. Don’t even think of a website if you didn’t know what to fill your website with. Period.
