Onwards and Upwards
Running a successful business website is hard work! Not only is there all the effort that goes into creating the website in the first place, but much more than that there is the ongoing monitoring, maintenance, updating, enhancing, advertising and more!
Therefore you should ensure that once your site is launched you view it as very much the start of an ongoing project and not an opportunity to tick the 'build website' box on your company strategy and leave it gathering virtual dust for ever more!
If your site achieves your goals, then ask if your goals were too modest and if you can achieve more online. More commonly in this day and age of so many websites and so many competitors, businesses and their employees get disappointed and quickly disillusioned with the performance of their site.
However you should remember that it takes eighteen months to get a good indication of how your site can perform for you. This is because all the benefits of organic links and ranking takes time - Rome wasn't built in a day, and whilst a website can be, the traffic to it and it's ranking certainly isn't built in a day, it takes time and hard work.
There are two main ways in which a website can disappoint. The first is not getting the level of traffic you want it too, and the second can be it does not achieve its aim when the visitor is there - it doesn't convert a high enough percentage of prospects into actual customers.
Therefore if you want to go Onwards and Upwards with your site you should always be experimenting, trying new things - trial and error is the method you will need to employ to get the best out of your site. Try slightly different layouts, different styles, different ways of linking between your key pages, and over time you will find the optimum way to drive your visitors to the pages you really want them to see, and up your conversion rate.
And remember to use all the stats and information available to you in order to help achieve this goal.
One final tip - consider starting a newsletter whereby you can engage with your site visitors; a good quality mailing list of customers or those interested enough to give you their email address is a great sales opportunity so make the most of it.
Hopefully you've found this guide to creating and running a successful business website useful. Good luck with your own site!
This guide to building a business ecommerce site is by Clarity Media Ltd
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
