If you’re a small business owner, you probably can’t imagine running your business without a website. And if you want to be a successful business owner, you need to have a really great website. This means that before you do anything else, you need to determine your target audience, the website’s purpose, your budget, your design, your navigation, and your content. Just making all of this up as you go along will result in a mediocre website that doesn’t work effectively for you. Follow these 8 keys as you create a great website that becomes the difference between success and failure for your business.

1. Know Your Purpose. Before you do anything else, you must determine the purpose of your website. The purpose is the basis of everything else, including content, navigation, and design. Is the purpose of your website to educate? To generate leads? To entertain? To make sales? If you neglect to define your purpose at the very beginning, then the rest of your effort is wasted.

2. Know Your Budget. Be clear about exactly what you can do with the budget you have and then make the most of exactly what you can afford.

3. Know How to Design. Pretty pictures are wonderful, but most search engines give preferential treatment to websites that go easy on graphics and focus instead on text. Minimalism is the way to go when creating your website.

4. Know Your Audience. Who are you hoping to attract to your site? Take this information and design a website that will be attractive to that audience.

5. Know How to Create Good Navigation. If your website is difficult to navigate or is cluttered with irrelevant graphics and text, your visitors will leave as quickly as they arrived. If your website doesn’t make sense to a visitor, if there are too many or too few links, or if it’s just too hard to get around your site, you will lost visitors right and left. A great rule of thumb is that is shouldn’t take a visitor any more than three clicks to get anywhere on your website.

6. Know Your Content. Your website must contain a good deal of keyword-rich text in order to get high search engine rankings. But your content mustn’t give the impression that you’ve been sitting in front of your computer all day trying to figure out how to cram in just a few more keywords. It must still be relevant, clear, and well-written in order to appeal to the humans who visit your site.

7. Know How to Build It. Who’s going to build your website? Are you going to do it yourself or are you going to hire a professional to do it for you? Your budget will go a long way towards answering this question, but remember that you get what you pay for. Find a happy medium between what you can afford and what you really need in a website.

8. Know How to Market. Believe it or not, people aren’t just going to show up at your website once it’s up. In fact, your website should be just one part of your overall marketing strategy that includes print information about your company (be sure to include your web address on all of your print material), television ads, and radio spots. If you’re not sure how to go about marketing your business, call upon the expertise of an internet marketing professional who can help you figure out where to go once your website is up and running.

A well-designed, relevant website is key to a successful business, but unless you’ve put a lot of thought, energy, creativity into creating your website, you won’t see any results. Follow these 8 keys as you prepare your website and you’ll see what an enormous difference a little planning can make.

Seomul Evans is a senior Search Engine Optimization Services consultant specializing in Meta Search Engines and SEO articles.

Article Source: 8 Keys To A Designing Great Website – ArticleSpan.com

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