The Jim Moran Institute
for Global Entrepreneurship
Location Location & Hours
Address, RBB 223
M-F, 8am-5pm
Map
Contact
e-mail send e-mail
Phone 850/644-3372
Personnel personnel

Websites

May 24, 2007

By Jerry Osteryoung

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. ~George Lois

Websites are becoming more and more important for visibility as well as for transacting business online. No matter what your business, you need not just a good site, but a great site.

The first thing you should analyze is the purpose of your site. Having a website just for the pure sake of having one is not good enough. You need to consider what you want the user to get out of visiting your website. One reason for having a website is to reach potential customers with some information about your firm. Another is to conduct business on the web. Transacting business on the web is clearly growing at a very rapid rate.

There are some general rules of the road for both new sites and existing ones. First, each and every web site must be simple and attractive. Too many websites try to cram too much information onto the homepage. Sure, you want to give users choices, but between simplicity and complexity, it is best to err on the side of simplicity.

Another thing to be concerned with is dead links in your site. As most sites grow they accumulate more and more of these dead links, and nothing turns users off more. Once this happens, your user is gone and probably will not return. One way to locate these dead links is by using a program like Linkbot, which crawls through your site and checks all of your links.

One great thing that you can do with your site is to make it interactive. The more you get visitors to participate in your site, the more it will feel like they own part of it. One of my favorite sites - both because it is funny and because of the neat products it sells - is www.woot.com. This site sells one product every day. With 2 to 3 hundred comments on each product each day, it is a very interactive site. The opportunity to leave comments about the featured product makes all visitors feel as if they have some ownership in the site.

Tracking is another very important factor to consider. You need to keep track of how many people use your site and how they are using your site. One program that will do this for you is SiteTrack (http://www.webstats-r-us.com/stats-web/signup.htm), which will track your visitors, what pages they go to and so much more. Many of these types of services are free.

In "Field of Dreams," Kevin Costner's famous quote is, "Build it and they will come." While this may be true of baseball fields, it does not ring true with websites. Having a great site is not requisite for much traffic. Build your website traffic by improving your placement on search engine listings.

There are a number of things that you can do to move up on a search engine listing and, consequently, get more traffic. Firstly, update your site on a monthly basis. Search engines look for regular updates when determining search result rankings.

Listing your site with many search engines will help as well. There are many search engine submission programs that will contact all of the search engines for you very easily.

The final easy thing you can do is utilize META Tags. Search engines look for these META Tags, which are hidden text placed in the first section of your web page. META Tags as well as a good title are critical factors contributing to search engine rankings.

If this seems overwhelming, consider hiring a professional to help you sort through it. Spending some money to increase your business may be worth it.

Maintaining a web presence is so important for each and every business. Now go out and make sure your website is the best it can be.

You can do this!