PL’s seven keys to a successful website

[Note: this article was originally written with a focus on the small business website but it equally applies to all websites for organisations. If you are working on an web presence for a large organisation, all these points still apply.]

People ask me about websites all the time. Mostly they are passionate small-business people that want some sort of presence on the Internet. These people don’t want to end up with a big designed website that is all corporate. And these sort of sites are expensive, of course, and we’ve all begun to realise that they don’t tend to work for you if they go and project an image of you that is bigger than you are.

The big ‘corporate’ website is something that isn’t really them, like a coat a couple of sizes too large that weighs at the shoulders and has overlong sleeves that get in the way of your hands.

But small business people need a web presence. So, what is appropriate and what works?

Seven keys

Well, I’d say there are seven keys to ending up with a usable, useful, comfortable website for an individual or passionate small business person. The things your website needs to be are:

Authentic

A web presence that reflects authentically the business or person that it is represents. It gives a real feeling of who it is describing and does it accurately. It doesn’t misrepresent or inflate or sell too hard. It conveys a true voice of the business or individual. I can’t stress how important being authentic is. It makes you comfortable with your web presences, which means you can write stuff on your own website and when potential customers read the site or search for the site, they find somebody that feels right to them. You get your kind of customers this way, and you waste less time with people who don’t get you or your way of doing things. If you do nothing else, be authentic!

Up-to-date

Any website needs to be current and relevant to now. It needs to convey that you and/or your business are alive and well and doing things. A dead, out-of-date site reflects badly on you and works against you. I tend to take a lot of notice of how old a site is when I’m choosing suppliers etc. Maybe I’m more picky than most, but hey,

Descriptive

It needs to describe what you do in enough detail that potential customers can find you and can understand how you are different. Being descriptive is important for search engines as well, and I’ll write more about that later. This is more than keywords. This really describing what you do.

Engaging

Like a good piece of writing, the site needs to engage the reader. If it can catch a reader and get them to be interested enough to get in touch, join in, or forward your web address to a friend, you’ve got something that works. Think about storytelling. I’ll talk more about making a website engaging in a later post.

Easy for you to update

It may sounds obvious, but, seriously, this is the one that really makes a difference. If you can easily change your own site without calling or e-mailing somebody else, then you can keep things up to date, you can write what you want to write when you want to write it.

Changing and Growing

The web went through a phase of static websites that were used by companies as brochures. Lots of that kind of web design grew from print-based design. However, these days web users and search engines really like change and growth. Why? The more content you add about what you do, the better the search engines will be able to direct searches to you. Keep adding stuff. It gives a sense of time, of history, of something ongoing.

Linked

Links from other websites help people find you from other relevant sites. These links are also used by search engines to work out how important or well-regarded your site is. So, what you are looking for here are links in context: links that come from partners or customers or others that also talk about what you do. Links exchanges and ‘cheating’ tend to work against you really, so stick to authentic links from others in context.

What now?

I’ll talk more about this in some more posts later. This dense enough for a beginning.
In the meantime, start thinking about this:

How can I build a website without a lot of effort, as a part of the rest of my business processes or a part of my creative process? See if you can imagine a way to make writing and updating you site part of your existing process.

And remember the keys:

1. Authentic, 2. Up-to-date, 3. Descriptive, 4. Engaging, 5. Easy for you to update, 6. Changing and Growing, 7. Linked