What makes a website successful?
At BMG Marketing, we are often asked by clients, what is the secret to making a website work and become successful. We decided to put this article together to try and offer some advice on what we have experienced and what steps you can take to make your website successful and working for you.
Tip 1: CURE THE ILLNESS NOT THE SYMPTOMS
A Poor web design, bad usability and terribly written code are symptoms of bigger problems. As a business owner, you need to trust in the expertise of a web designer, if you do not change the underlying issues, call it fundamentals of good web design, then no matter how hard a web designer will work, you will always be facing an uphill battle to see positive gains. As web designers its our job to stand our ground and insist on best practice design and development, ultimately the client will love the results and you will have a nice addition to your portfolio.
Tip 2: UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
As Web Designers you need to understand your clients business objectives. Without having a clear idea of the siteʼs business objectives, the client has no way to know whether it is succeeding. This means they have no justification for further investment and that leads to resistance regarding further investment in the website.
However most importantly, without clearly defined business aims they have no standard against which to base their decisions. Everything becomes subjective and this will inevitably lead to problems.
Before we start discussing design, usability and development, we need to focus our clients on establishing concrete business objectives. This will provide a framework for decision making during the development phase.
This will not only help the client make decisions, it will also focus them on the business and away from micro managing the design.
Tip 3: ESTABLISH CLEAR CALLS TO ACTION
Once business objectives have been set this opens up the possibility to establish clear calls to action.
We often encounter situations where our clients cannot name their calls to action. You need to have a clear plan and call to action strategy or your website is doomed to fail.
Calls to action are vital for all types of websites. Whether you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter or complete a contact us form, every site should have a desired objective for the end user.
What is more, each page of a site should have micro calls to action that always draw users on and never leave them at a dead end.
Without clearly defined calls to action you cannot successfully design a site, structure the user experience or measure its success. They bring focus to the site and encourage the client to concentrate their efforts on helping people reach those goals.
Of course in order to know if a call to action is going to work, it is necessary to do some user testing.
Tip 4: TEST AGAINST THE RIGHT TASKS
As web designers we need to ask the right questions and clients find it relatively easy to tell you who their target audience is. Admittedly the list they come back with is often overly long and contains a lot of edge cases. However, where they begin to struggle is articulating what these users will want to achieve on the website. They know who they want to reach. However, they cannot always tell you why those people would be interested in the site.
These user tasks are another fundamental building block for any successful website. \Again, this provides context for the decisions they are making about design, usability and functionality. Without it the site will become self serving, largely ignoring the needs of users.
User tasks help to focus the clientʼs mind on the needs of their user, rather than what they can get out of them.
Conclusion:
We at BMG Marketing feel strongly that without business objectives in mind, your website will not achieve its desired goal. Having a great design, usability and code matters and will simply complement your websites success. We firmly believe in making sure that the fundamental questions are asked and answered by the client, ultimately we want every one of our websites to succeed and help our clients businesses grow.
If you would like to know more about our products or services, please do not hesitate to contact us today.