When I see a great website, I bookmark it so that I can incorporate some of the ideas from the site into my clients’ marketing campaigns.
A good small business website works well and looks pretty. Because of all the great design tools and plugins available, there are many good websites that work well and look pretty; but what I’m really on the look out for are fabulous websites.
Fabulous websites are compelling in their content and navigation; and they incorporate specific tools that are sure to drive SEO. This third component is what differentiates the good from the fabulous. The best way to get from good to fabulous is to get a Marketer involved in the planning and design stages of building the site.
There are three people needed to make a great web site: the web developer, the graphic designer, and the marketer.
The web developer is the code girl. She can make your forms work, your pages function and your shopping cart thrive. She finds out what you would like your site to “do,” and makes it do that.
The web designer is an artist–she is skilled in graphic design and layout and consults with you to determine what you want your site to “look like.” Is your business professional or trendy, artistic or glamorous? A good web designer will use the latest tools to make your site look awesome.
The third person often not consulted when small businesses create their websites are marketers. Marketers know how to “attract“ and “engage“ visitors with websites by understanding consumer and human behavior. How can we engage visitors to stay longer, look at more pages, interact with the site? What practices help or hinder whether a visitor comes back another time? What do we need to do to get better exposure on the search engines?
Sometimes a web developer is also a graphic designer or a graphic designer is also a marketer, but to be safe it’s a good idea to have a three-fold plan in place by asking three simple questions:
1. What do we want our site to DO?
2. How do we want our site to LOOK?
3. What will we do to ATTRACT and ENGAGE visitors?
Answer those three questions and your site will end up bookmarked on my Fabulous list.
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