I sat in a meeting yesterday and a statement was made that was clear as day to me, “Use your website as a business tool – not an information tool.” Why? The answer is simple to me. If your in the business of making money and your website is not assisting in that then it’s a liability – not an asset.
Most people build their websites to reflect their internal business structure. In some cases this may work, but in most cases this is not recommended. Your website should be developed with your audience in mind. Unless your internal stakeholders are the audience, designing your website for your CEO may not really be the best method. Here are quick tips on turning your website into an asset – not a liability.
- Know who your audience is and know how you can measure success with each class of visitor. Sit down and list each class of visitor you’re trying to reach. List the steps through the process of the site that you would consider a successful conversion. This approach is often called a “conversion funnel.”
- Goals must be clearly defined and measurable. If you can’t measure the goal you’re listing – then it’s not a good goal. You must be able to say whether or not you’re achieving this goal. I would suggest being as specific as possible too. Just saying you want more traffic is not enough. State a goal like, “I want to increase unique visitors by 15% in two months.” That goal is defined clearly and measurable.
- Instead of looking at navigation from top-down, look at it sideways. Great. Now I’ve lost it. What am I talking about? Look at your navigation as a function instead of a list of links to get you from point A to point B or point C and D. Set up your navigation revolving around your target audience. Education websites usually do a decent job at this. They have the general navigation for academics, advising and others, but they focus navigation on “Future Students, Current Students, Alumni and links directly targeting their core audiences.
- Keep your navigation simple. If your customer cannot reach the conversion point within three (3) clicks then your navigation is too difficult or you’re just not putting your “banana” out there enough for your customer. Keep it simple.
- Make everything fast. Ricky Bobby said “I wanna go fast.” So does your customer. Most of your customers, especially in e-commerce, want to find what they’re looking for, get it and get out. As a business you want to engage as much as possible, but your best bet to get them to keep coming back and looking for more is making it quick and easy to get what they want.
There’s other levels of turning your website into a business tool, but for now let’s start small and focus on these things. If you’re just starting out on redesigning your site or turning it into a business tool these suggestions can be great to get you going in the right direction. Do you have other ideas? I’d be glad to hear them.
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