Wednesday 19 November, 2008
As clients, and potential clients, of professional firms
increasingly use the internet for information and to evaluate the
services offered prior to engaging them, it is critical for your firm to
implement these strategies when re-developing your website.
Recently Google announced that there are now over one trillion
(1,000,000,000,000) unique pages on the web, compared to 26 million
pages when Google was launched in 1998. And the number is growing
rapidly every day.
Studies have shown that the average time you have to capture the interest of a visitor to your web site is a mere 3-6 seconds.
So how does a professional firm maximise the chances of your clients or potential clients finding your website within this volume of information in the first place? And then, how do you retain their interest long enough to achieve the objectives of your site?
All too often people and businesses are in a hurry to get an online presence, which they believe will solve all their problems. But they don't first stop to fully consider the needs of both the visitor and the business itself, and the resulting website often is both disappointing and ineffective.
Source:ceoonline.com
Studies have shown that the average time you have to capture the interest of a visitor to your web site is a mere 3-6 seconds.
So how does a professional firm maximise the chances of your clients or potential clients finding your website within this volume of information in the first place? And then, how do you retain their interest long enough to achieve the objectives of your site?
All too often people and businesses are in a hurry to get an online presence, which they believe will solve all their problems. But they don't first stop to fully consider the needs of both the visitor and the business itself, and the resulting website often is both disappointing and ineffective.
- Planning your website
In order to achieve the required results for your firm it is important that you design and structure a site that fulfils your business objectives and vision.
What do you want to achieve from your website? Do you want to inform and educate your existing clients, attract new clients, sell information or products, provide professional training, build a database of clients and potential clients, share downloadable content, provide an easy contact point, etc?
It is important that you know exactly what your goals are because that will help dictate what web-pages you will need and the structure and functionality of the site necessary to achieve those goals.
- Understand your target audience
Assuming you already know who your target market is, you need to also understand what motivates them.
What is their goal in visiting your site, what values do they look for, what services do they require, what barriers, such as security or quality might they have, what is their common language when searching for your services?
Understanding your target market, how they think, react, doubt and are reassured is critical to ensuring your web site can deliver the promise to them.
- Review your competition
One way to understand what your site visitors may expect is to review your competitors' web sites. Look at their navigation, style and tone of language, look and feel of the site, elements that engage the visitor or encourage them to share information or provide feedback.
Consider what elements are working and what you think could be improved. Search online for similar products or services and evaluate the sites that are getting good search engine rankings.
- Plan your navigation carefully
One of the most important aspects of your web design is the structure of the site that dictates the way in which the visitor navigates around the site.
The "usability" of a site needs to be simple and intuitive, with as few clicks as possible to find what they are after. Navigation that is too fancy or complex will frustrate the visitors and lose them quickly.
Use logical and standard navigation that web surfers are used to, with logical labels that make clear the content of each page.
- Attracting visitors to your website
There are many different online and off-line marketing strategies to consider for your website, on which countless books and articles have been written.
As part of your online strategy you should develop a complete marketing plan that encompasses all possible marketing activities, relevant to your business, that support and promote the marketing of the web site.
Online options include search engine indexation, pay-per-click advertising, banner advertising etc. If you are relying on search engine optimisation then you need to carefully plan your site's structure, and build in relevant key-words into the site itself.
- Make the content relevant
If your site contains content that is very relevant and informative then other sites are more likely to create links to your site. The benefit of this is that you will get more visitors re-directed to your site, but also your search engine ranking position will improve because your site will be considered offering quality information by the search engines.
- Commit to content management
It is important to always have up to date and current information on your website. So in the planning stage, commit to inclusion of a content management system that allows you to always keep the information accurate, relevant and timely, and make sure that the site is always up to date. There is nothing that will lose your potential clients more quickly than out-dated information.
Source:ceoonline.com
No comments:
Post a Comment