Do You have a Website Plan?

Studies show that 80% of consumers research a person, company or product from your Website before picking up a telephone, visiting your store, or completing an online purchase. 

Be prepeared with a well thought out Website Plan to help get the conversions you want and need.

12 Ideas for your Website Plan:

1. Have specific goals for your Website.

2. Understand your customer or Website visitors and what they want to get out of your Website.

3. Create pages dedicated to specific subjects or items the customer or site visitor is looking for.

4. Do not make your home page a Flash animation. Website visitors routinely skip those animations (or just leave) because they aren’t interested in pretty graphics. They want facts. If you’re going to use Flash to demonstrate your product (or a video) let people choose to view it.

5. Always make your Website easy for visitors to find what they want. Use a simple navigation structure, and if you absolutely must use drop down menus, make sure visitors can actually click on the links without the drop down rolling up before the person hits the link they want.

6. If you’re selling products, have category pages plus individual pages for each type of product. (For example, if you are selling kayaks, have one page for kayaks with links to individual pages for different types of kayaks, such as River Running, Freestyle, Play, Creeking.)

7. Pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO) in setting up pages. The more closely the page title, page description, and keywords match what someone would search for, the more likely they’ll find the Web site, and the more likely they’ll buy whatever product is advertised on the page. Always include keyword-optimized image files and formats. Preferred formats, in order, are PNG, JPEG and GIF. Include your alt keyword text in the tag so spiders can read your images.

8. Create a means for legally and ethically capturing your visitors email address so you can contact them in the future about your product, news, etc.

9. Plan to advertise and market your Website on an ongoing basis through all methods available to you.

10. Look at and measure your Website traffic, bounce rates, sales conversions and progress.

11. Always ask for feedback and testimonials from Website visitors and buyers.

12. Keep in contact with Website visitors (those who gave you their email addresses) on a regular basis so they remember to come back to your Website.