Step 2-Know Your Audience

You must know your audience if you want your website to succeed. If you want visitors to visit your site, you must understand why they are visiting and more importantly, what they were searching for when they came across your website.

This is incredibly important if you are trying to convert visitors into paying customers or if you are providing a service. Targeting the right visitors will help you convert these visits into business.

The last thing you want is to have visitors reach your website and leave because it was not what they were looking for in the first place.

You want to be sure that you are providing a website that will fit the needs of the visitor. There are a few ways to ensure that the visitors that you attract will stay on your site and more importantly, return to your website in the future.

Create a website that is attractive- You will be determining the look of your website. Even if you hire out a designer to do the design work, it will be you that makes the final decision on the look of the website. Aesthetics can play a huge role in the attraction of visitors to your site. We all know that we have visited ugly websites and left immediately, sometimes without reading a single word, just because the website was unattractive. You will appear more professional to your visitors if you focus on creating a website that has visual appeal. In line with this idea, your website must have a level of constancy to it as well. You will want the pages that you create to have a similar structure and look. Most CMS websites will ensure this. If you are creating a static website, you may want to create a template or use a predesigned template to ensure continuity. We’ll discuss the differences between these two types of websites later in the building process.

Make your website easy to navigate- Have you ever visited a website that was hard to navigate? I bet you didn’t stay there very long. Your visitors will not stay on your website very long if it is hard to navigate. Navigation should be easy to locate and easy to understand. Just because you know how to navigate to other pages within your website doesn’t mean that your visitors will know what to do. You need to be able to understand how your visitors will view your website for the first time and have somewhat of an idea of how they will behave once they arrive on that page. Easy to read and understand navigation should be found on every page of your website. A visitor to your website should be able to reach your home page from every page on your website. Remember, the page that a visitor enters your website may not be the home page.

Be sure that your web pages load quickly- Nothing is more irritating than visiting a website and it taking forever to load up. People will leave your site if it takes a while to load your pages. To ensure that your pages load quickly, you will need to be sure that they are not bogged down with useless filler. By filler, I mean unneeded photos or videos. I love Flash, but it doesn’t belong on your site. The web has progressed to HTML5 and if you want interactive elements that will display on tablets and mobile devices, then stay away from Flash. An unseasoned Flash developer will create huge files that will cause your website to load in just under an eternity. The best way to lose visitors is to create a website that loads slowly. To avoid this, design your site for all visitors, even the ones with slow Internet. Don’t get me wrong, your site should be visually stimulating. just be sure to do this wisely.

Communicate to your visitors what you’re all about right immediately- Branding is important in any business and this is true for developing your website as well. A visitor to your website should know what your site is about in just seconds after they arrive. If a visitor can’t figure out what you are providing with your website quickly, they will leave. This is why it is important to clearly communicate to your visitors up front what you are all about.

Doing these simple things will ensure that your visitors that arrive at your site are the ones that you are targeting. And once they arrive, they will stay.