Web design has become relatively simple. Almost anyone can design a website using either professional design tools or free software. Most of these sites do not look polished. A few have a a good design and look professional and polished. The problem is that good looking, well designed sites do not make money. Websites that make money are designed to make money. Yes they look professional, but that is not their primary goal. Take a look at ebay, this is not a visually satisfying web site, but it is designed to make money – and it makes a lot of money. It takes two things to make a profitable, successful site; focus and traffic.
Your site needs to focus on only one, at most two primary goals. Visitors to your site should be guided with a single purpose through your site, with every word and click designed to make them take the desired action. Everything is a distraction. Your goals could be;
- Making a phone call for more information
- Calling for an appointment or consultation
- Purchasing a product
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Contributing or making a donation
You also need traffic. The more the better. The best traffic is targeted traffic, that is visitors that are keenly interested in what you are offering. It is better to have 100 eager visitors a month, than 1,000 that happened to stumble on your site.
With all this in mind you should ask your web designer, whether it be a big city Atlanta Web Design company or a small Peachtree City Web Design company these three questions.
How will my site encourage my visitors to fulfill my primary goal of …fill in the blank.
Answer: Your designer should be able to walk or talk you through the design features that will provide the desired action from your visitors.
What will you do to make sure my website will get traffic?
Answer: They should be able to talk to you about Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) as well as conducting keyword research to determine the best keywords to use and assessing the strength of the competition for each keyword.
What will you do to ensure my website will rank well on Google?
Answer: Your designer should be able to walk you through the on page and off page search engine optimization they can provide. They should be able to tell you how they can provide you one-way backlinks to your site and increase your website visibility. If your designer talks to you about submitting your site to x number of search engines – they probably have no idea how to properly market your site. Search engine submission no longer provides any benefit to website owners, in fact submitting your site to the Google search engine manually will almost guarantee it will take longer for your site to show up on search engine results. A designer with a good understanding of SEO can get your site indexed within 24-72 hours.
