In part 2 of our series “What A Business Website Should Do” . Full Voice Media has once again graciously contributed this fantastic piece about what makes a website great.

So what important for a great business website? Well for starters, a business website should:

Communicate YOU:

1. Reflect Your Brand: You must have a clear idea of what your business represents and how it should be represented (relative to the competitive landscape). Choose four or five descriptive words to sum up your essence, the qualities you want to convey, the tone and attitude of your business. Then make sure all your communications, including your website stick to these qualities. Try to select a color theme, and visual style for your brand as well as a verbal style. Consistency is reassuring and aids in recognition and loyalty. Building a well-conceived brand gives your business a personality and evokes emotional characteristics unique to you.

2. Communicate your USP: Every business, service, or brand should have a developed “Unique Selling Position” (USP) and impart that uniqueness not only on its website, but as an identifier in all it’s communications, advertisements, etc. Your USP might be you, so feature yourself prominently. But more likely it will be your profession or your products or service. You must be the best at what you offer, or the best value, or the most convenient, or something that makes your customer or client want to use you and not your competitor. Find your USP and emphasize it.

3. Expand Communication: Using your website to announce new offerings, products or services or even market trends in your industry adds another layer of opportunity to enhance your reputation and increase sales.

4. Be Direct: Websites need to serve their users. The easiest way to do this is to present information in a friendly concise manor. Whatever tone you adopt, make sure you keep it simple and direct. And always be consistent.

5. Be Memorable: Try not to use templates that give your site an impersonal look. Use great images and a coordinated color scheme that is unique. Consider your target audience and make sure your website represents you in a way that your clients would appreciate. Being bold or unexpected is OK as long as you remember that communicating clearly is your primary goal.

Have Heart:

6. Emphasizing Your Desire to Please: It’s not only about how great you, your service or your product is, it’s about what the client or customer wants and needs. You need to elicit an emotional response. Be cool, or humorous, or fun or simply amazing… just don’t be bland. Make the user believe you care. Offer specials and promises of exceptional customer care, ask for suggestions or run surveys, make guarantees (specify guarantees that you know are actually guaranteed but will make the customer think you are special), shipping and return policies should be obvious and phrased in a way that seems generous. As we’ve said giving out free advice, tips, and links to other related businesses is a sign that you want to help and are an expert. Overall focus on making the whole experience of visiting your site pleasant and enriching with the end user in mind.

7. Be Totally Honest: Don’t exaggerate and oversell yourself, be transparent and forthcoming. People today are too savvy to be fooled by wild claims and misleading hype. And don’t shade the truth either, if there is a negative in your business, tread lightly, but don’t misrepresent. Be authentic, users will notice and appreciate.

8. Use Testimonials: Try not to praise yourself or seem to brag, let other voices do that. In fact other voices are much more likely to be listened to than your own even when people don’t know the actual source (wink, wink). But of course if you can get reviews or other professional opinions, by all means incorporate them.

9. Conduct Surveys: Find out how you’re viewed by your customers and show them you care with periodic surveys or questionnaires. Website pop-overs (on page pop-ups)  and email campaigns are popular ways of gathering this data. Make it easy to opt out of such intrusions, but make the effort.

10. Incentivize Action: Try to get the viewer to respond, register or interact in some small yet meaningful way. Hold a contest through a blog entry in which leaving a comment enters the user to win. Pose a single question opinion request on your homepage. This visitor action goes beyond an average online interactive experience and can help you establish a relationship that will add to your bottom line.

11. Emphasize Customer Satisfaction/Service: Make sure your policies and service strategies are clear and simple. Good customer service clearly explained on your site is another reason people will have to choose you.

Design, Design, Design:

12. Great, Clean Design: Website design today is a fairly mature undertaking compared to the sloppy, experimental, and underdeveloped days of the 90’s. What once seemed more than adequate may now be lacking. Part of this is because our minds are so good at seeing improvement all around us. We then integrating that new knowledge into our expectations of everything else we see. As we see more examples of cleaner, or more useful website design, with better layouts and content delivery systems, we become achingly aware of sites that are dated, confusing, seem standard or funky or whatever. We are beings who constantly improve ourselves and expect enhancements in the world around us. We know that users want the most important information right away, simple and direct. Try to keep it simple, but be rich and attractive. Keep font use to one or two families with most of your text as html so search engines can index your site properly. Choose a color theme and stick to it. Keep headers/footers consistent on all pages so that no matter where on your site a user journeys they will understand how they got there and how to get back. Put yourself in your users place and list everything they might want; prioritize the list and present the most important things loud and clear followed by the next most important and so on.

13. Simple Navigation: Use as few navigation headings as possible and certainly no more then 10. If you have more pages try to group them in drop down menus to keep things neat and organized. Navigational hierarchies are your friend as our minds naturally categorize and organize information in a similar manner. If you must have a long list of items, each with their own page, order them alphabetically and keep the list vertical on the left side. Use mouse over changes to confirm which areas are links. Again remember your purpose and keep it simple.

14. Use Industry Standard Conventions: Don’t use templates, but don’t confuse users either. Logo and navigation placement is fairly consistent among top websites (top left corner) and that’s because people get used to things and then expect them. Registration and search areas are usually in the upper right area. Don’t forget a contact page, an about me/us page, a testimonial area, a policies page, site map at the bottom and have a blog if possible. It may seem that this “conformity” could stifle unique design or weaken your efforts of differentiation…  That’s wrong. People who design cars don’t reinvent the wheel to create something new and beautiful. They take what people require and expect and make it new, different and unique in every other way possible. I see exciting designs almost every day that wow me yet also stick to standards.

15. Registration Stratagem: Gathering email addresses of people interested in your business is invaluable for future growth. With today’s technology sending thousands of emails out is easy and super effective; it’s having people to send those emails to which can be more complicated. Figure out the best way to encourage people to share their email addresses. Offer them advance notice of specials or news about you. And only require an email address with all other personal info like phone, physical address and so on optional. Create a pleasant greeting when people register and follow up with a thank you message. And keep in touch.

16. Leverage the Availability of Free Tools: Google marketing program offers businesses many advanced features such as allowing photos and videos to be attached to your companies search results listing. Other major sites and programs also want to help you market your website at little or no cost. Do a search for “free business tools” or “free marketing tools” or the like and see all the amazing offerings you can take advantage of. They may not be free forever so don’t wait until it’s too late.

17. Employ Analytics: Add an analytics package such as Google Analytics to understand who is coming to your site, how long they stay on particular pages and where they go on your site. Try to spot trends and see what marketing efforts are having an effect. If traffic increases after an email or direct mail campaign, or sales go up after a holiday special you’ll know what is working. If nothing happens after some promotion, start to figure out why and decide how to improve it next time. Don’t ignore website analytics. It’s work, but it pays off. (It’s FREE too).

18. Search Engine Optimize (SEO): Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an incredibly complicated field with new techniques and schemes being devised constantly. Its’ goal is to get your site to the top of any keyword search that might relate to your business. Search engines index your website by looking at all the html text on your pages, by keywords and descriptions behind the scene in your “metatags,” and by examining how your site links to and is linked to other sites on the world wide web.

For the best keywords use a service such as the Google keyword tool or  Google search based keyword tool to find the best keywords related to your business, and write a concise clear description of your site using these keywords. This description is what will appear in a search engine results list. Follow the Google Webmaster guide. It’s a free guide that explains all you need to know about how to appear as a result on relevant searches. If your business is in a single location, don’t forget to use a few town names in the surrounding area as keywords and in your description. Interestingly, Google itself claims to not use the keywords in the metatag, but other large search engines do, so to be safe I would advise you to cover your bases and include them. It can’t hurt. The most important thing in this area of SEO is to use the keywords in your website text itself. Do it in a sophisticated manner; try to integrate the keywords naturally and don’t worry if you can’t include all of them. Your html text is very important to search engine ranking.

Links from, but especially to your site is another area where you can easily boost your search rankings. Links to other sites related to your business are important and links from related sites are even more important. Contact other related sites and ask for a link exchange; “I’ll link to you, if you’ll link to me” kind of thing. It benefits everyone, so most companies and individuals are happy to participate. If you don’t have a specific links page, write something nice about the other site in your blog and link there.

There are many other more complicated and costly ways to affect SEO, but these are some of the easiest with the highest value. Test your SEO by searching with various keywords to see where you rank. And keep tweaking; a website is never finished, it’s an evolving process. Good luck and please link to us!

Alec Hess is the Principle and Lead Project Manager at Full Voice Media. He’s also an entrepreneur and creator of outstanding products such as Penance Pill. Visit Alec at Full Voice Media or head on over to his blog.

*Photo by James Kirby Photography