Making a Good Website Great

So you need a great website but where do you start? How can you make a place where customers want to go? That seems to be the question asked in books, courses, newsletters and even websites – with varying degrees of of accuracy and success. In thruth, there are really three focus areas that you need to keep in mind when building a website and traffic flow.

As an online business, your first line of communication with your customer is your website. This is where your customers turn for more information, ordering, support and even complaints. If you've noticed that your website isn't converting or has dropped off in traffic, it's time for a change.

- Make sure that your website is up and running. When you are having issues with your hosting providers, customers will not be able to get to your website. This may seem simple enough but fact is many times a sale is lost because of slow loading web pages or even a website being completely down.

- Increase your SEM. When customers type in your products and/or services into their favorite search engine, are they finding you? Chances are no and yet the tricks to increasing your websites SEO traffic is pretty straight forward. Don't rely on third parties if you run a small to medium size website. Most techniques only require a small amount of time and can often be completed in house at little to no cost.

The next step in the process is to create a website that keeps people coming back for more.

- Make your website simple and easy to navigate - Your website needs to be easy to get around, this means that a user should know where they are at all times. Simply put, the less time a user has to spend navigating your website, the more time they are focusing on your products or services. Remember, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention and typically once it's gone, it's gone.

- Make your website safe and secure - Like it or not, safe and secure are today's buzz words. If people feel that their information is not safe on your website, they will not interact with your website. Try using merchant accounts that provide extra security features or secure payment forms and always make sure you use secure pages for collecting private information. Additionally, show your merchants that you value their security by using third party auditors such as hackersafe and third party risk management tools such as preCharge certified payments.

- Make contact you easy - Too often websites don't include contact information, either a phone number or even an address. While we live in a world of personal security being a big concern, fact is that goes both ways. If you are not supplying complete contact information on your website, including a phone number and mailing address, you are loosing out on valuable sales.

Finally and yet most importantly, take constructive feedback for what it is. Too often website owners take feedback personal when in fact it's free advice. Accept the fact that no website is perfect and can always use some type of improvement. Listen to your visitors and accept their opinions for what they are, your potential clients opinions, make them count.

Article Source: http://www.allwebcontent.com/articles

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