Before you begin to build a website, you need to determine your website's primary purpose. This may sound like a simple task, but it can be very difficult - especially when your business has multiple product lines or revenue streams. Most managers have a hard time boiling their goals down to a single action they want their site visitors to take. This is precisely why most websites out there fail to draw even a small amount of traffic, and then once they do get a hit, they lose
prospect because they confused her or gave her impression that website wasn't fully baked.Websites do not need to be large to be effective, but they do need to take two things into consideration. First, they need to be responsive to visitors' expectations and give them what they expect to see. Secondly, they need to drive visitors to take desired action for which website is designed. Generally speaking you will want your visitors to take one of following five actions:
- Purchase a product or service
- Provide contact information
- Download a white paper, datasheet, or other promotional materials
- Join your newsletter
- Click on advertiser’s banners or affiliate links
There are other goals websites have, but these are primary five goals most any site has. I have built over 100 websites – everything from consumer oriented e-commerce sites to B-to-B corporate sites to municipal management systems and intranets. Regardless of size or scope, single biggest mistake I see managers make over and over is trying to make their sites do too many different kinds of things. You should establish your site’s primary purpose, and make everything on site revolve around that goal.
When a site is properly focused on it’s primary purpose, visitors understand intuitively what it’s about and are not left with feeling that they are being “gamed”, or worse that site is irrelevant to them. They are also less likely to become confused about what they are supposed to do if they are ready to take next step with your company.
That means that if you are trying to collect names and email addresses of potential clients for your consultancy, you shouldn’t waste valuable real estate on your homepage discussing your “corporate vision”, you should be concentrating on establishing your expertise and demonstrating knowledge your potential clients are looking for. Likewise, if you are supposed to be selling products on your website, then forget about trying to appeal to investors. Investors will be most impressed with a retail site that effectively converts visitors into customers, and you’ll make a lot more money in process.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have multiple goals for your business. This simply means that your site should focus on its primary purpose, and that purpose should be directly related to revenue-generating activities.
Once you have identified your site’s purpose, you should take time to write out general path you would expect your visitors to take through your site. Think about it from their perspective. Some examples of this are:
Example 1
The visitor comes into site and sees that my site is a retail seller of electronic devices. I plan to have several items featured on front page of website that represent major product lines that I carry. The visitor can select one of featured items, or select a product category from navigation bar. Once visitor selects an item, he or she is then given a detailed description of product and a price. By clicking “Buy Now” button, visitor is taken to shopping cart system where he or she is given option to continue shopping or check out.
