It’s surprising how many businesses chuck together a website simply because they feel they ‘should’ in an online age. These sites often end up as stagnant and confusing monuments that offer little benefit to the business or visitor.

If your website isn’t doing what you want, or if you’re embarking on a new site, make sure you ask yourself these questions.

What is it for?

A deceptively simple question. What purpose does your website serve? Is it a sales pitch? Is it a space for returning clients? Is it an e-commerce site? What do you want visitors to do? Contact you? Buy something?

The answers to these questions should profoundly affect the design and content. Most small business sites are simple affairs that serve two purposes: persuading new customers of the value of your services and expertise and providing a route to contact.

Anything that doesn’t serve these functions should be cut.

Does it provide good ROI?

Building and maintaining a website costs time and money. The question is, are you recouping that? It’s very easy to get lured into constructing an all singing all dancing socially integrated HTML 5 beast when all you need is a 5 page online brochure.

Don’t add more features than you need (see above), and don’t add more features than you can maintain.

If you don’t think you can realistically update a blog on a regular basis, don’t add a blog. Nothing says ‘closed down’ more than ‘last updated 2 years ago’ (see also Facebook, Twitter).

Does it support your offline business?

Online strategy shouldn’t be separate from offline. A website is useful if only for something to point people to when you meet them in the ‘real world’. However, if it’s a confusing mess that is rarely updated, you may be doing more harm than good with it. Sometimes a phone line is enough.

On a more positive note, it can be used to bolster offline promotions. Let’s say you want to provide a discount for customers of another business. Putting up a poster is great, but if you can build a custom landing page you’ve just made it easier for them to find out more and get in touch.

If your online and offline promotions don’t support each other, your site isn’t doing what it should.

Image Credit: Image*After

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 10:34 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.