CEO Stories 084: Planning a Website That Hits Your Goals

Everyone has a website -- at least it feels that way. So how do you makes yours special? But more importantly, how do you make it strategic? Your website should help you hit your goals and not just “stand still and look pretty.” Website Designer Samantha Mabe is delivering us her best tips to create a pretty and powerful website.   Top thing people get wrong when starting a website:   They want their website to be pretty more than something that works for them. Start with brand strategy- your mission, what you are trying to accomplish, and who your dream clients are.   When honing in on the website, you need to know the top 3 goals you want to achieve with the website.  This drives your decisions on what goes on the website, what gets left on, and what goes where. Samantha then creates the website vision guide where she pulls out the most important things for the client from the questionnaire.  These help drive the platform used, the timeline, and the content the client needs to write. Have 3 goals because everyone who comes to your site is in a different place.  Some people may just be there to view and others to actually purchase. You need to accommodate all people while still making it the easiest for you on the back end. Typical goals: Get people to sign up for an email list with opt ins Sell service or product Get people to share your content You need to know what the journey looks like for different people that come to your website. Most important is to figure out where to put the correct information. Give them enough information about you but not everything.   Have easily found tabs for the things that you are best at front and center.   Samantha leaves off the retainer and graphic design items from her website.  Those are things she offers on the backend and does not want to confuse clients.   If you already have a website, she with make sure you have analytics set up and run a test on how easy it is to navigate.   Analytics is not a comparison tool to compare businesses.  It is to help you compare yourself overtime. Samantha likes to look at where the traffic is coming from, most popular posts, and where the people exit the website. Numbers are an easy way to check things if you know where to look and what to look at.  You do not have to look at every number and data that you are given. Have someone actually user test your website.  Conduct a user experience test and watch it. See how they navigate and how they interact with it to see if it actually working.