Having decided that you need a website and that you obviously want your website to be successful, then you should consider the following.
What do I want my website to achieve?
What needs to be done to construct my website?
How will I know that my website is achieving what I want?
These questions may seem obvious but many of the clients I build sites for are unclear about their goals, how they can be achieved or how they will know when their goals have been reached.
Website Types
There is no single solution for websites since the requirements of each case determine which web technologies are best suited for the purpose. Most websites are designed to fulfil one of the broad requirements below.
Brand building or brand re-enforcing
Product, services or information based
A Brand Building or Brand Re-enforcing Website
This type of website is really just a brochure that backs up off-line literature. It should look good and give visitors an idea of the values it represents.
It may display examples of goods or services but doesn't actually sell anything. It doesn't need to be a large site, or require any fancy programming although it might include a contact form.
Success for this type of site doesn't require high traffic since most visitors have probably been referred by off-line literature. The site only needs to present a good image to succeed.
This is probably the easiest type of site to create since it doesn't require many pages and it's static so only requires HTML.
So to construct this type of website only requires a knowledge of HTML, CSS, graphic design and usability.
A Product or Services Based Website
This type of website sells products, services or presents information. The point is that it is an online enterprise and whether it's for profit or not for profit, it needs to sell itself.
Success means high traffic and this fundamentally affects site construction and maintenance and requires ...
Lots of pages and content to capture as much traffic as possible
Constant monitoring of traffic
Content alterations based on traffic results
Whether or not you use pay-per-click, a big site will capture more traffic than a small site. And even if you don't have many products or services to stretch over all the site then relevant information pages will generate traffic to the areas of the site that you most want visited.
When a site becomes large it presents a maintenance challenge. Pages can be HTML but imagine a situation where each time you add a page you have to add a link to every other page on the site.
This is time-consuming and leads to errors. The solution is to use PHP, which allows you to create a page template that uses PHP include files for parts of pages that are common to all pages - such as site navigation.
Success Means a Cycle of Incremental Changes
Despite all the frills that web technology offers, content is still king. It's the text content, particularly headlines, which get attention and spell success.
It would be nice if there were a one-size-fits-all formula for this but there isn't. The only way is to try what you think will work then monitor the effects such as bounce rate.
Bounce Rate A bounce is considered to be when a visitor leaves a web page, within a predetermined time, without visiting any other pages. The bounce rate is the number of visitors who bounce divided by the total number of visitors expressed as a percentage.
It's only with a cycle of incremental changes in conjunction with monitoring that results can be achieved. This means that you must learn all that's required to create and maintain a large site, using HTML, CSS and PHP, if you want success for your site.
For comprehensive website monitoring Google Analytics is hard to beat.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of a web page is the percentage of page visits that end in the action that you desire. The desired action may any of a number.
The visitor clicks through to the order page.
The visitor clicks through to a catalogue.
The visitor signs up for a newsletter.
Whatever the required action the conversion rate can be measured and improved upon based on those measurements. Google provide an excellent tool that allows this called Website Optimizer.
The basic idea is that you choose a landing page that encourages the visitor to click through to a second page.
You then create a second version of the landing page and insert Google tracking within all three pages. Google will then randomly present alternative versions of the landing page.
You can then monitor which version of the landing page results in more click throughs to the second page.
This can be repeated multiple times on multiple pages to optimize your site for the best results possible.
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