Rethinking Why You Built Your Site

Many companies forget too easily whom / what they built their websites for. Your website is a marketing tool meant to provide information about yourself and your products or services to your customers. In some cases, it also serves as the only point of contact with your customers.

Keeping this in mind, try and answer the following 5 simple questions to see if your website fulfils its purpose – the reason you built it in the first place:

1. Does the first paragraph on your homepage tell visitors exactly what you do?
   Before you had a 20-page website, your customers relied on your homepage to find out exactly what you did. Can they still do that, or do they need to plough through 10 pages before they know what you are offering them?
2. Does your website speak the same language as your target audience?
   Literally and figuratively, your website should speak the same lingo as your target customers. E.g. a website providing legal advice to consumers would not be very effective if it used only legal jargon.
3. Does your website encourage visitors to perform an action?
   If the objective of your website is to generate leads, are your visitors contacting you after browsing through your site? Or is your site so information-rich that visitors read some of it get tired and just move on?
4. Does your website highlight your business or your web design skills?
   Fancy graphics, flash design, and cool scripts may be fun to view, but will not help you turn visitors into customers. Is your website compromising information for design?
5. Is your website easy on the eyes?
   Remember when you offered just one main product and visitors knew what it was by taking one look at your site? Visitors don’t like being confused. Try and keep things simple. Even if you have a lot to offer, focus on the key offerings on your home page and delve deeper on individual pages only.

If your site is doing all of the above, it is probably time for you to sit back and rethink why you had built the site in the first place and how you can achieve that ideal all over again.