Web Site Design

12 Tips to have a website that help your bottom line

Looking for a new website? Want to make an extreme makeover to your existing website? Be sure your new website follow the following simple guidelines:

• Respond to your needs
• Designate a responsible
• Follow your corporate image (brick and mortar)
• Clean Graphic Design
• Highlight your Unique Selling Points
• Build Rapport and Trust
• Include Calls to action
• Updated information
• Search Engine Friendly Technology
• Prepared to grow as your business grow
• Include Web Analytics
• Continuous Improvement 

Respond to your needs: What kind of site do you need? electronic brochure, lead generation, customer service, product catalogue, e-commerce or perhaps one to serve employees and partners? Make sure that your website help your business objectives.

Designate a responsible: Designate a top level executive in charge of your website strategy. Make sure to designate someone that understand that the site must produce a positive Return on Investment.

Follow your corporate image (brick and mortar): Your new design must use the same logo, corporate colors, fonts as you use in your brick and mortar business. Unfortunately many companies decide to go with a template design that is not near similar to their corporate image.

Clean Graphic Design: Don't try to say everything in one page.  Less is More. Try to keep each page simple and focus on one theme. White space is important as it allows the visitor to focus on your message. remove all unnecessary clutter.

Highlight your Unique Selling Points : clearly define what's make you different from your competitors? why is the visitor should consider your offer. Speak to your End Customers: People don't buy products, they buy solutions. What problem you will solve to the customer? What pain will you alleviate to them?

Build Rapport and Trust: Make you site easy to navigate, easy to follow. Anticipate your visitors concerns and solve them. Clearly establish your credentials, your guarantees, your partners, your testimonials. Focus on your End Customers (is not about me is about my customer).

Include Calls to action: Once you solve your visitors questions, move the visitor with in their buying process. If they are early in the process, ask them to download a white paper, a comparison chart. build mechanisms so they can subscribe to your newsletter, ask  questions,  request a quote, ask for an appointment, request a demo, buy your product, talk to an specialist, share a comment,  etc.

Updated information: Make sure the information you post is recent and accurate. All websites now give the customer the ability to update the website information without any programming knowledge.

Search Engine Friendly Technology: Try to avoid the use of unfriendly Search engine technology like frames and flash. Make sure your website allows you to manage the meta tags as well as the name of each page (url). Your website should not use layouts based on tables, but instead should be based on Cascading StyleSheets (CSS), also your pages should not contain programming errors and then pass  the html validation test. Make sure that you submit your web pages to the major search engines.

Prepared to grow as your business grow: The website is a work in progress and the Internet is here for the long run. You should always be doing maintenance (adding pages, news, updating info, adding some functionality), but you don't want to star over again every year o couple of years because webdesign demand a lot of resources (time and money). Therefore choose a tool prepared to grow as your business grow.

Include Web Analytics: Include a good web analytics program that allows you to easily measure the performance of you website. Set goals an measure them. Today's technology allows customer to know with precision even the number of calls a campaign  generated (and even record them). Use your website to measure the success (or failure of your off-line advertising). Stop guessing! put your marketing dollars where they produce the better ROI. 

Continuous Improvement: Once you measure, then strategize,  if you are not meeting your goals analyze and plan, then implement (one change at a time), and measure again.

Finally I would add that if you don't have a team with enough resources to tackle this project (graphic designer, business analysis, project management, web programming, internet marketing) then outsource the project to WSI or a similar company that be able to deliver you a project on time, on budget, using the minimum resources from your company.

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