What are some characteristics of a professional business website that capture your attention and keep you coming back? Would it include something such as:
- Easy to find via search?
- You perceive the business is credible because of the design?
- You perceive the business is valuable because the information, product, or service will help achieve your goal?
- You have confidence in the offer and take action?
Those are fairly reasonable characteristics, and yet most business websites almost always fail at these four points. With these in place you’ll have a professional, compelling website that is both attractive and informative, making it almost irresistible to your customer.
Let’s take a look at a before and after of a website we all know about, the White House.
This older version (circa 2002 – view the above image in full size) nearly fails on all four characteristics. While it does have a lot of information, including podcasts, the site is cluttered with unorganized information and links making it difficult to use. Let’s compare it to the new White House website:
This version (circa 2009 – view full size) doesn’t just succeed on all four characteristics, it exceeds. Here is why:
- The site is easy to find via search. The site is designed and developed using web standards so that nothing stands in the way of the search engines (i.e. Google) indexing every single page. Many business websites are built incorrectly because they don’t use these web standards and are being hurt by it. This may be one big reason why you receive little traffic.
- We perceive the business/agency is credible through design. The website not only looks good, but it’s easy to read and it’s easy to find information. The top menu has simple drop down menus and there are links to all main pages at the bottom of the site. The featured articles are attractive and engaging. These factors build credibility and trust.
- We perceive the business/agency is valuable because the information, product, or service will help achieve something. This rendition of the website has a blog, email newsletter, and video posts that are constantly updated. This keeps us informed, educated, and coming back. Thus making the site valuable.
- We have confidence in the offer and take action. Because we perceive the site as valuable, we will take action and subscribe to the site via email. (This action could be different for your business – e.g. purchase a product, download a white paper, or contact your sales rep).
As customers seek out your product or service, your business website is the first source for information they seek. Knowing about these four characteristics or only meeting one or two of them isn’t enough, only making these changes in full will allow you to see a positive rate of return from your website and web marketing initiatives.