Planning a Website

Before creating a website, there are are some planning steps you need to follow if your site is to be successful. Plan carefully to ensure that people are able to use it easily.

Create some goals

Step one is setting your site goals. What do you hope to accomplish by having a website? Keep a list of your goals handy as you go through the design process. They help you focus and align your website to your specific needs.

Organize your site structure

Organize your site carefully from the very beginning and save yourself time and frustration later. If you create content without considering structure, flow, and hierarchy, you may end up with unrelated materials scattered through numerous poorly named folders and categories.

Create a clear path to action, e.g. purchasing a product or subscribing to a mailing list.

Creating the design “look & feel”

Your website should reflect your company identity and maintain consistency in the page layout and design to ensure a good user experience.

Navigation

A visitor should be able to click through pages and never get lost and they will quickly become frustrated if navigation changes unexpectedly. Navigation must be consistent throughout your site.

Think constantly about your visitors and the experience you want them to have. How do they move from one area to another? Consider the following:

  • Visitors need to know where they are in your site and how to return to the home page.
  • A search box makes it easy for a visitor to quickly find information anywhere on your site.
  • A contact form lets visitors connect with you on any subject.

Collect assets

Once you have a clear picture of your sites goals and the audience you are targeting, you can begin to create and collect all the assets you need. These can include:

  • Texts
  • Images
  • Graphic files (company logo in vector format, etc.)
  • Media (video, slideshows, etc.)
  • Downloadable documents (PDF, Word, etc.).

All these items need to be ready before you begin developing your site, so that you won’t have to hold up the process.

Note: Be sure to make your texts easy to read on a monitor. Use short paragraphs and bullets.

Your Website: What do search engines want?

The ultimate goal of search engines is to help people quickly find exactly what they want.

Search engine algorithms (especially Google’s) discover and discard poor-quality content from their search results. This includes duplicate content (texts copied from other sites) and keyword stuffing (which makes content meaningless to readers). Algorithms have become sophisticated over time and are now better able to discover problematic content.

  • Google especially, has refined its processes and frequently penalizes problem websites by throwing them out of the index altogether.
  • This means that a website earning thousands of dollars can suddenly disappear, reducing its sales to zero overnight.
  • Penalized domains are often discarded by their owners, due to the cost and effort involved in getting Google to set back the clock.

Search engine vigilance (Google mostly) is bad news for those who believe they can manipulate the search engines into showing bad content, but it has resulted in a better search experience for the general public.

So, what do search engines want to see?

  • Well-written copy that is concise, with no keyword stuffing or hidden text.
  • Correct spelling and grammar (such errors annoy the public as well as the search engines).
  • Texts that are on-topic, containing relevant, well-placed keywords and phrases.
  • Correctly designed hypertext links.
  • Correct use of <h1> and <h2> tags, and bolding.

We, who understand and abide by the basic premise and purpost of the search engines, optimize your website according to these rules and guidelines.

Your Website: What do visitors want?

Plan your website carefully

  • Visitors want to know that they have come to the right place. The keyword that brought them to your site should appear on the page.
  • They ask: Who are you? What do you offer? A visitor has to be convinced of your sincerity and the value proposition offered by your company via the website.
    • Value proposition: How does your website fill a need or solve a problem? This has to be clear to the visitor in less than 12 seconds.
    • The message, both visual and textual, needs to be obvious and understood. Visitors want clear, concise content that strikes them as sincere. If your message comes across as just another empty sales pitch, or, if your offer is poorly presented and confusing, visitors will quickly click away to the next website.
  • A clear path to action such as accessing or purchasing your product or service, and leaving lead information, etc.
  • Web-ready texts. People who surf the web scan pages quickly for main ideas, without reading every word. Hence, web copy needs to be concise and broken up, using headers, bullets, bolding, and captions. This enables a reader to get a good overview in seconds.

Credibility

A visitor wants to trust and believe in you. They want to feel a connection with you.

The impact of a website’s “personality” on a visitor affects the level of trust they have towards a product or services, and the company behind it. Read: Impact of Website Personality on Consumers’ Initial Trust

Web 2.0 & Social Media

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mash-ups, and folksonomies. – Wikipedia

The web is constantly changing

Keep your site interactive

  • The focus of Internet marketing continues to change with Web 2.0. We are all part of the social media revolution.
  • Interaction with your customer is key.
  • It is all about user-centered design, interactive information sharing, and collaboration.

Web 2.o and Social Media allow customers to let you know what they want, so you can respond to them.

Many successful businesses use the latest features of the Internet to interact and converse with their customers. Today’s businesses know exactly what their customers want. They learn this through social media:

  • Blogs
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • and other Internet social media tools

Social Media: A business tool

People are talking about your business on Facebook and Twitter.

Are you participating in the conversation? If you are not involved in Social Media, someone may be responding for you, which can hurt your business.

  • Social Media gives businesses capabilities beyond what they ever had in the past: to learn what the market is asking for.
  • Today people care more about how their social graph ranks them, then about their Google rankings.
  • Businesses are using Social Media as an important tool to acquire leads and new customers, as well as to help them better serve existing customers.

How can you benefit from Social Media?

Social Media includes tools such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that are becoming an essential part of marketing.

Watch this video for a better understanding of the importance of Social Media in business.

It’s just a matter of time before your competitors will be using Social Media, if they are not doing so already.

You too, should be using Social Media tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your business.

 

Website Personality & Consumers’ Initial Trust

The Impact of Website Personality on Consumers’ Initial Trust towards Online Retailing Website

by Jasmine Yeap Ai Leen, T. Ramayah, and Azizah Omar

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 66 2010

Abstract

E-tailing websites are often perceived to be static, impersonal and distant. However, with the movement of the World Wide Web to Web 2.0 in recent years, these online websites have been found to display personalities akin to ‘humanistic’ qualities and project impressions much like its retailing counterpart i.e. salespeople. This paper examines the personality of e-tailing websites and their impact on consumers’ initial trust towards the sites. A total of 239 Internet users participated in this field experiment study which utilized 6 online book retailers’ websites that the participants had not previously visited before. Analysis revealed that out of four website personalities (sincerity, competence, excitement and sophistication) only sincerity and competence are able to exert an influence in building consumers’ trust upon their first visit to the website. The implications of the findings are further elaborated in this paper. Read more…

 

Today’s Marketing is Circular

Get the word out

Advertise your products and services on your website, then:

  • Place your web address (URL) in every printed marketing piece, publication, and offline media (presentations, radio, TV, etc.).
  • Simply publish a bi-line or headline, and send people to your website for details.

Marketing on the web

  • Search engines: Your website will be accessed by many people who arrive via the search engines, where they looked for your services and products. Right from the start, it is vital that your website is designed so that it is friendly to search engines. We stay abreast of the ever-changing rules of search engine content criteria.
  • Social Media allow business to understand customers and their needs.
  • Domain names can support your marketing efforts.

 

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