Of course nearly all businesses these days have a web site, but does it do anything?

In the early days, companies decided to have a web site because they felt they needed one and they filled it with as much information as possible. Truth is most people won’t bother to read it all.

Put yourself in the shoes of somebody on the web looking for your products or services. What would you want to see? Does this company look legitimate? Are they local to me? Are they any good?

One important thing to bear in mind is that people are very impatient when viewing web sites. If they do not immediately see what they want, they will go elsewhere.

The home page should sum up everything you do. You should aim to reassure people they are in the right place, and then allow them to easily find more information about the part that interests them.

Make your site easy to read by providing short paragraphs, each with a heading that sums up what the paragraph is about. Your site should answer the questions that visitors have and guide them down to making an enquiry or purchase

Every page should have some sort of ‘Call-to-Action’ and if it doesn’t you need to ask, “What is the point of this page”? The CTA might be a form to complete, a PDF to download, or just a big number to call.

Things like free useful guides or gifts work extremely well and help you to capture names and email addresses that you can then follow up.

And a very interesting point is that it can actually be more effective if you provide the free gift and then ask users to provide their details after they have got it. Users may be sceptical if they have to enter details before seeing the goods, but once they have got them it is actually in our nature that we feel we should give something back!

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