But unfortunately many companies launch a website, and then begin marketing it. What they have done in essence is make their website another product that they need to promote. Your website should do the marketing for your company, not the other way around.

So when developing your website expect it to help grow and increase your exposure as you constantly create and publish high-value content that your customers or clients would love, therefore over time gaining backlinks and growing your search engine rankings, and therefore your leads or sales.

By performing two simple tasks you can go a long way towards making your website work for you. First of all, as I mentioned above, make sure that it contains compelling, valuable content for your visitors to read, and then ensure that search engines can crawl and index it as effectively as possible.

Then work on getting other sites to link to you. The more popular the site linking to you is, the better your traffic will be for a couple of reasons. The search engines award high rankings to sites that are linked to by a diverse range of other sites.

Even though your website is unique to your product or service, there are good design practices that should be implemented on all successful websites. Obviously your target customer and your product dictate a lot about the form and function of your website, but there are certain characteristics that most successful websites share. Some of these main points are discussed below.

Home Page
You home page is like the reception area for your business. It is the first impression that a customer gets when they enter your site. A visitor may find your website through another page with the help of a search engine, but it is the front door to your online business. As such, you need it to do a good job of representing you and it should make the customer want to continue deeper into your website and hopefully do business with you.

Not only is your site’s home page a visitor’s first impression of your online business, but it should also accomplish a few goals, namely:

• Display Branding – Your site’s home page should reinforce your brand. You want to use this opportunity to display any graphic images or logos that your company uses to identify itself.
• Showcase Products & Services – Your site’s home page outlines your product line or your services for the customer at a glance. From your site’s home page they can delve further into the details of a specific product or service, but they should be able to take a quick look at your website’s home page and know what your company has to offer.
• Generate Interest – Your site’s home page needs to not only display your products and services in a quick overview format, but also the page content and presentation needs to be interesting. It has to grab the visitor’s attention and hold them there long enough for them to appreciate what you can offer them. You can gauge the effectiveness of the page’s effectiveness by monitoring your site analytics Bounce Rate percentage. High bounce rates means that you should change and test your page using a testing tool such as Conversion Chicken or Google Website Optimiser.
• Convey Trust – You site’s home page needs to present a solid, trustworthy first impression. If it is too flashy or gimmicky it will not convey that element of trust that you want your customer to have. You know that you are trustworthy, but your visitor has to take a leap of faith and give you a chance. Make it easy for them by having a thoughtful, solid home page.

About Us Page
Your website’s About Us web page helps a visitor get to know you and your company. The type of information that you want to include on this page are things like how long you have been in business; how much experience you have; what business organisations you belong to; what guarantees you offer; any specific training or special talents that you bring to the table, and it is an excellent place to introduce your staff, if you have any.

Your site’s About Us web page helps you be a tangible entity in the customer’s mind. Think of it like the conversation that you might have with a retail customer as they are checking out. They are learning a little bit about you and your company, and they feel good when they walk away. This page should build confidence in your customer.

Contact Us Page
Your site’s Contact Us web page should only request minimal information (name, email, phone, message) for the user to contact you, as this is an important conversion event. This page is also a good place to include your businesses hours of operation and hours for phone support if different. For example, while office hours may be 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, you may offer customer support from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. every day. Your Contact Us page is the perfect place to display this information.

Products & Services
If your site sells goods and services, then you need to have pages dedicated to product description details and photos. If you only offer a single product or service, then you may be able to include this information on your home page, otherwise you will need to detail the information on your product and services pages.

Your Product and Services pages should be complete with every detail that you customer may want to know or see about a product including color, style, price, size and specifications along with photos including zoom capabilities to showcase product details. The design of your product page should be clean, easy to read and easy to navigate, and of course (and this may be stating the obvious but its not obvious to some people!) should feature a conversion event, i.e. “add to cart”, or a contact form.

Site Navigation
When you are designing your site you want to take the time to look at it from your visitor’s point of view. Site navigation should be intuitive. You never, ever want a customer or visitor to get tangled up or lost in your site. You also absolutely do not want a customer to click any link on your site only to end up in the middle of someone else’s site, unless that is expressly intended; think of this: do you really want to go to all the effort of attracting a visitor to your site only to have them invited to leave it?

A well-constructed site lets the user move easily throughout, and it offers a sitemap so they can quickly find whatever they need.

Here are a few things to designing the navigation for your website.
• Be Consistent – The navigation buttons or tabs should be in the same place on each of your web pages, and they should look the same. Whether you use buttons or drop down tabs, you want to be consistent throughout your site.

• Be Obvious – This is where a sitemap can really come in handy. At a glance your customer can tell not only where they are, but also where they want to go. You can also use breadcrumb trails/links to remind customers where they came from. Whatever method you choose, be consistent and try to make it virtually impossible for anyone to get confused and lost in your web pages.

• Be Helpful – Again the sitemap comes in hand to allow customer to get a good overview of where everything is on your site. You do not want customers to have to dig around for what they need. Consistent section headings throughout your navigation can help a customer find what they are looking for. Another helpful feature that you may want to include in you website is a site search, but if you include it, make sure that it works properly, and also make sure you track it’s usage in Google Analytics

Putting It All Together
If a website is well constructed not only will it be easier for the customer to use, but it will be simpler for you to maintain as well. When you are using your website to broaden the reach of your company regular maintenance is absolutely necessary to keep your website up to date and functioning properly. So when you make the commitment to go online, take the time to design a visitor friendly site that will keep your customers coming back time and time again.