subject: What makes a good web presence? [print this page] What makes a good web presence? What makes a good web presence?
So how do you expect your website to look? Well this based on, how you want your potential customer to react after the first glance. Obviously you are out there to impress!
A good place to start when creating a useful and successful business is to include information on:
- What the business does
- The product/s or service/s the business provides
- How the business be contacted
Simplicity is a key in a good website. Lots of graphics can frustrate a reader with a slow internet connection. Music, animation, and color can be powerful tools if used appropriately, but they can also be a sign of an amateur website. Moving cursors and cute cartoon characters are out of place on a business page. Disorganized pages, too many links, articles that go nowhere and many other details can complicate the use of a website and turn the reader off.
To make your website successful you need to provide something of value to your customers. No matter what the purpose of the site is, the information contained in it should be useful to the visitors. If the material is outdated, poorly edited, or incomplete, readers will feel cheated and will most likely look for an alternative source of information next time they are reading about the topic. So whether you update your site everyday or just once in a blue moon make sure you have valuable content.
However just creating a site with valuable content that remains static will not keep people coming back time and again. Think for example about your TV, if your favorite program was on you would probably watch it. Now what if all it ever showed was the same episode over and over and never showed anything else? You would probably watch it a few times but would soon get bored. The same is true of a website, no matter how good the information if it never changes people will get bored and stop visiting it.
Taking these ideas one step further, you can allow customers to interact via the website. This could be as simple as having a contact form, or as advanced as allowing customers to buy products or services online via the website. Forum or chat software is a great way to do this.
Success on the web means getting people to do what you want when they visit your site. So the first thing you need to do is decide what it is you want them to do. This is called the Target Action. In most cases it's buying something or fills in a form. If you haven't determined what your target action is before you built the site, its worthwhile looking at your site once you have determined your target action. Once you have determined your Target Action you need to determine how successful the site is.
