What Makes an Effective Website

A website can be much like owning a Ferrari. If it’s sitting in the garage where no one can see it, then it’s not going to attract the attention you expect. Likewise with a website. If no one can see it then you’ll find that it’ll be just another piece of real estate.

If you want your website to work for you and gain some traction, then you need to get it out of the garage and show it off.

Let’s talk about traffic

The quickest way to get your website out there is to buy traffic. Buying traffic is a very quick way to get prospects to your website. You can buy traffic from a number of sources such as Google, Yahoo and even Facebook in the form of advertisements.

If you are a tradesman and service a local geographical area then you can add an area radius within which your advert is displayed. Same with Facebook. You can make your Facebook adverts so targeted that you could narrow your advert down to display only to women between the age of 20-30yrs who are parents to a child 0-3yrs. As you can see, if you’re smart about it you can generate some very targeted traffic.

Conversions

The effectiveness of buying traffic is very dependent on how well your website converts your visitors from being prospects into being customers. This is a challenging area where a lot of businesses fail. Business owners commonly don’t pay enough attention to how the website looks, whether it’s got clear headings, call-to-actions and a navigation that points the visitor into your sales funnel or desired pages.

There are a number of ways to measure the effectiveness of your website. Using tools such as web analytics and heatmaps allow you to analyse what your visitors are doing and how they’re navigating your website. You can even watch a playback recording of how the visitors navigated your website and what they clicked on. It’s never been so easy to evaluate how effective your website is, so make sure that you’re tracking your results.

Invest in your design

Don’t be mistaken into thinking that a good looking design is an effective design. Yes, having something that catches the eye is on the list, however, in the 30 seconds you have before the visitor navigates away to another website, you need to think about what action it is you want them to take. This is known as a call-to-action and be found in many forms.

Some examples of a call-to-action are; a sales video, an opt-in email form, a buy now button or simply a phone number. The key is to grab the eye of the visitor and lead them to take the action you want them to. Calls-to-action should be strategically placed at the top of your website, where the user doesn’t have to scroll to see it, and backed by additional points throughout your page. Headlines, images and colours also play a big factor in achieving an effective design.

Your designer must really understand these fundamentals plus human behaviour and the way that visitors interact with websites. Be sure that they take the time to really learn your business and what it is that you do. This will ensure that through your web design, visitors will get a clear message about you and the problem that you can solve for them. Most importantly though, they need a clear message about how to act upon what they have seen on your website.

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