8 Best Practices Of Running A Successful Website

Running a website that sells is all about good communication. 

The internet provides new ways of communicating with your customers that could never have been considered a few years ago. 

When you are constructing your site there are various elements of successful communication that you could bear in mind.

1. KISS

Make your content easy to understand.  Website content should be written in short simple sentences. 

It should avoid complex words and the use of technical jargon that might put your customers off reading. 

Good spelling and reasonable grammar is essential, although your writing style can be fairly informal and relaxed if that suits your particular business.

When you are coming up with headlines, it can be tempting to try to be clever or cryptic.  However, this is not necessarily a recipe for success online.

A simple straightforward headline can tell your customer what to expect from the article or webpage and does not risk losing their interest through lack of understanding.

2. Get ‘em involved. 

 Make your site interactive.

There are many ways to allow your customers to interact with your site, and these can be very effective at making your customers feel really connected with your business.

Basic forms of interaction include a search facility and a ‘contact us’ link that allows your customers to send you a direct e-mail. 

More complex forms of customer interaction include discussion forums, product reviews, polls and surveys.

3. Keep it current. 

Unlike a printed document, which begins to go out of date as soon as it comes off the printer, your customers will expect the information on your site to be up to date and accurate on the day they read it.

 This means that maintaining a successful website is a never ending exercise.

Before you begin to build your site you might want to determine how much time you can dedicate to updating, archiving etc. once the site is up and running. 

You could consider making sections of the site time sensitive and updating these regularly, while other static sections just get updated and refreshed annually. 

4. Ever read the last page of a book first? 

The way a website is structured, with a network of internal links, leads to visitors reading information in a very different way. 

With a traditional book you start at the front and keep reading until you get to the end. 

However, with a website you can start at any page and read the pages in any order you wish.

Because your customers could land on your site at any page, each page needs to stand alone and have enough information on it to be easily understood without a great deal of explanation and introduction.

5. Are we there yet? 

On a successful site, visitors should always be able to see where they are on the site, and where any links on that page will take them to.

Navigation facilities should be easy to use, placed in an obvious spot, and should be well spaced out.

If customers are able to find their way around your site easily they are likely to stay for longer.

6. Give them what they came for. 

Appeal to various complexity levels.  It is not possible to know whether a single visitor to your site is looking for general information, or very specific technical details. 

Luckily, with a well designed website you can cater for both needs. 

Your home page can link directly to some main pages that provide general essential information. 

These pages could contain links to further, deeper pages that have much more detailed content with technical information.

7. Show, don’t tell.

Communicate through graphics. 

The HTML coding format of webpages allows you to combine text and multimedia elements. 

Using photos, graphics and even video can make communication with your customers easier and more entertaining.

It is worth repeating that all graphics used on your site should add something to your message. 

Meaningless multimedia files will just distract from the content on your webpage.

8. Let them take it with them. 

Many internet users still prefer to print out interesting articles or reports to read in the traditional manner. 

After all, most of us have experienced that square eyed feeling form trying to read from the computer screen for too long.

Providing your content in printable format is one way to cater for these customers, but you should also make sure there is enough information on the printed copy to put the document in context. 

Information to add includes document title, author, date of creation, a short description, and the keywords the document is optimized to.

Finally we will take a look at balancing your site design so it is attractive to both your customers and the search engines.