While new whiz-bang things are nice, they can be at best, unnecessary, and at worst, distracting from the purpose of the website.

A balance needs to be met that encourages creativity but retains the adage that “content is king”.

To achieve this balance, here are three areas that I believe are important.

• KISS – Keep It So Simple
• Don’t do anything silly
• If I were a customer…

You can look at these areas from both a designer’s point of view but also from your point of view. If you have contracted a designer to provide you with a website to sell you and your products and services, don’t get baffled with talk of fancy jargon and the like, make sure it delivers your message effectively.

KISS

Yes, it really does work… Keep It So Simple is a key idea throughout a project. Your message is what needs to get through. Some industries lend themselves toward more complicated and visually impressive effects (i.e. entertainment, music, art), but remember that this is still promoting the message.

You do not want your home page to become cluttered and bogged down with too many words; this is the place to convince your visitors that they want to know more. Make sure your navigation is simple and makes sense; it is easy to fall into the trap of having snazzy looking menus and buttons that don’t tell you what they are supposed to do. All this does is wastes your customer’s time finding the information they need.

Don’t do anything silly!

While this is more of a pointer to the designer rather than the person paying for the service, as the client, it is your website that maybe affected and so you should keep tabs on what is happening to your website.There are some very simple things that can slip the net when creating a site.

Hopefully your web designer will have enough sense to have the site thoroughly checked before it goes live, but it is amazing what you see out there on the net. From spelling mistakes to grammatical, these small errors on the website promote anything but the professional image you have paid for. Look for these things when you are either completing a site or when your site is due to be delivered to you:

Make sure the title on each page is defined (this is what appears right at the top of your browser). It is surprising how many “untitled documents” slip through the cracks. It is also very important when getting recognised by the search engines

Titles and descriptions are often played down when it comes to optimising your web pages for Search Engines. The “META tags” are hidden from normal view but can help indexing your site or helping display your page to it’s best in their search results.

Broken Links – there are two reasons for making sure your links are working: firstly, nobody likes clicking on a link and finding it doesn’t work and secondly, links are very important when indexing your page. If you are linking to external websites, you will need to periodically check them to make sure that they still work.

If I were a customer…

You must always remember that the whole purpose of your website (especially if you are promoting products or services) is to get people buying or enquiring from you. With this is mind; you need to make sure that everything that is done is done for the benefit of the customer.

You navigation should be simple and intuitive, your written content should be clear and easily understood, pictures should enhance the rest of the website and everything should direct your customer to the point of your website being there: Making an enquiry.

In summary,

A website is a communications medium, and with all communications you should tailor it to the intended receiver of the message, your customer.

Make it clear, simple and focussed on your customer and you have the best chance of making it work.

In such a cluttered on-line world (and getting busier every day), you need to have something on your site that grabs peoples attention and more importantly keeps them coming back again and again.

The first thing that you need to make sure is that the content you have is current and if possible updated regularly (regularly may mean different things to different businesses, from daily to monthly). This may mean text, pictures or even a seasonal redesign or makeover. Google do this well by simply changing the graphic of their logo to represent different events.

Once content is being refreshed, it gives your customers a reason to come back. For many the products or services we sell are not commodity items and so return business is less certain due to the infrequency of the purchase.

If your content is changing (and obviously worth reading) then your customers are going to return to keep up to date with the developments.

Online Newsletters

You can create a newsletter for people to subscribe to. Periodically you can send out a newsletter that will inform and also propose products and services that your readers may like. Newsletters are still a very viable way to deliver a message and generate enquiry.

Articles

Withthe  industry expertise that you have inside your business there is plenty of ideas for articles. These can be unique to your business or talk about more generic things. What it does, is gives your visitors to the website a reason to keep coming back, especially if you can generate these items on a regular basis.

Great websites are not always the prettiest looking (although it helps); they are the ones with information that keeps the visitors coming back.

You may not have the time to update your site everyday, but by making key changes, you can get customers coming back again and again.

Talk to your web designer about how these ideas can be implemented. There will be a cost, but you may find the return visitors make it worthwhile.

So the answer is simple…Make it SuperSticky and make them want to come back.