It’s where people look for information about your business before making contact. It extends your marketing reach and increases business opportunities.

A website is a key tool in marketing your business

• Customers. It may be the first point of contact many people have with your business.
• Marketing. It extends your business marketing reach and allows you to compete with larger businesses on equal terms.
• Business growth. No website represents loss of business opportunities.

Key Points

• It’s where people look for information about your business. It informs them about you, your products and services.
• It engages with clients or customers. It supports your sales by allowing people to engage with you informally before making contact.
• It maintains business focus. It clarifies your business drivers. Underlying a successful website is a clear vision of where your business is now and how it will develop in the future.
• It’s a cost effective marketing investment. You can connect with clients and customers when and where they want.
• It has measurable benefits. Through website traffic analysis, it’s easy to identify which pages or goods and services are popular and what people are searching for.

In the race for new business is your website a competitor or a spectator?

Your website has to deliver 5 things

1. Support your business marketing. Through presenting your business effectively to decision makers.
2. Attract and retain visitors. Through creating search friendly results that promote visits.
3. Display and navigation. Display correctly on popular web browsers and with intuitive site navigation.
4. Content. Content must be interesting and relevant.
5. Call to action! Encourage visitors to undertake a transaction – to buy or contact you.

Consider the following in relation to your website

• What is your website doing? Is it actively promoting your business?
• Is it current? Like traditional marketing material, websites require regular updates to reflect both changes in your business and buying trends.
• Are you converting visitors on your website? Every visitor to your website is an opportunity for a transaction. Is this happening?
• Where do you appear in search engine results? Search engines constantly improve their search algorithms and your competitors improve their websites. Where do you appear?

Business marketing messages, information, products and services shape a website structure. Identifying the information architecture is the process whereby all these elements are brought together. The process identifies the major web pages and how the site will be navigated for intuitive browsing (website usability).

To design the information architecture requires a knowledge of the business. Business First is the process to gain knowledge and understanding thus ensuring the published website reflects the business marketing aims.

Large Websites

The larger the website the more important it is to review the information architecture to ensure information is placed logically within it, and to ensure there is room to expand without significant website redesign.

Reflecting Your Business

One important point worth noting is that the website information architecture should reflect the way visitors see your business from the outside, and not how your business in structured internally.

Simply, a website that has a set of administration pages that allow you to change the site’s content via the same web browser you are using to view this site. CMS and WCMS are generic names for all websites that have this type of administration interface. It is found on services websites (such as this), eCommerce websites and blogging websites to name a few.

CMS Administration and Updating

You administer the site through a web interface; adding, deleting, and changing content, together with adding new web pages and menu items.

No special software is required on your PC to manage your website, and the website management tools are easy to learn.

Finally, you can update your site from anywhere on the planet, providing that is, you have an internet connection!

Blogs fall into two basic categories; personal and business.

The aim of of a blog is twofold; to build an on-line community to give and receive information and secondly, to enhance your web presence as search engines love blogs because they represent active content.

Blog websites can be installed either standalone or integrated with a business CMS website solution (like this one).

For a professional installation, the ‘look and feel’ of the blog site should be consistent with the main website so that switching between the two is seamless for the visitor.

Business Blogs

A business blog is an informal way of marketing your business, ideas, goods, and services.

It allow you to inform visitors about new business developments, create a buzz, and seek feedback on ideas for new products and services.

Blogs are often run in parallel with other social media routes to market, for example, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Personal Blogs

Typically an informal on-line diary used to express your thoughts and gain feedback from others.

Your website must have immediate visitor appeal (see website usability guidelines) but there is a balance between sufficient information for the visitor to make a decision and too much that they won’t read. Getting that balance right is the hard bit.

Authoring takes into consideration your business marketing (see Business First), website structure (the information architecture) and SEO requirements (see SEO).

Services Websites

Services websites require sufficient and engaging information to persuade visitors that making contact with you is worthwhile. Think of it as your business CV, and like any good CV it won’t get you a job offer but it will get you an interview.

eCommerce Websites

eCommerce websites have different information criteria covering products, descriptions, pricing, availability, reputation, and security. It is important that your website covers all these in sufficient depth to encourage visitors to undertake transactions.

Building a successful website requires an understanding of website usability blending website structure and content together.

Website Structure

Structure should follow established conventions to prevent visitors having to learn new ways of interacting.

Website structure covers for example, ‘look and feel’, search engine optimisation, accessibility and font styles and sizes.

Website Content

Content sentence complexity should be aimed at the target audience.

Web content covers writing style, language complexity, sentence and paragraph construction and information presentation.

Positive visitor experience

• Interaction. Visitors want to interact with your site at their own speed.
• Site navigation. Ensure the site layout and navigation are intuitive and follow established conventions.

Negative visitor experience

• Distractions. Heavy use of advertisements or moving text and images.
• Registration. Asking your visitor to register before providing basic information.
• Incomplete site. ‘Under construction’. If there is nothing to say, don’t say anything.

Visitors increasingly see ‘Search Engines’ as ‘Answer Engines’ to answer their question.

The Challenge

Visitors to your website want answers quickly, and with the minimum of effort expended.

They can be quite ruthless in assessing the benefits of spending time on your website.

This results in visitors ‘information snacking’. That is, coming to your website, collecting a piece of information, then going off to another website for another piece of information.

The challenge therefore is to answer the question and retain the visitor on your site long enough for them to undertake a transaction.

Positive visitor experience

• Content scanning. Visitors interact with your website by scanning content on the web page. If it looks interesting they will read it.
• Information foraging. Your site structure and content should support foraging to enable visitors to find the answer they seek.

Negative visitor experience

• Unreadable text. Block text, small fonts and poor colour contrasts are difficult to read on screen.
• Introduction screens. Visitors almost always opt to ‘Skip intro’ when flash introduction or splash screens are displayed.
• Browser Plug-ins. Don’t expect visitors to download a browser plug-in to see your content.
• Page load times. Visitors are impatient. Too long and they will give up and go elsewhere.
• Browser incompatibility. Failure to display your web page correctly on their browser.
• Poor site navigation. Not knowing where they are and how to navigate their way round the website.