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Jerry Gitchel writes valuable articles that help organizations and individuals design, build and maintain a successful web presence.

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Beyond the Basic Web Site
Taking your Web Site to the Next Level

So you have a basic web site. Folks are finding you on the web, but you wish it would make money instead of costing money. A small site is fine when you're starting out, but your web site should expand right along with your business. Improving and expanding your site can lead your business to greater opportunities.

Here's the problem with having just a basic site, it's just not big enough to attract return visitors on a regular basis. Once they've seen your online brochure, there's no reason to return. Your expansion objective is to turn visitors into prospects and prospects into customers. Adding content and features to your site gives them a reason to return. A well designed site helps you leverage each visit into a solid client relationship.

But all this sounds like work. Building and publishing your first site was a big undertaking. To accomplish this new objective, treat it like a project. Create a plan that includes who you hope to attract to the site, how the site should look when we're done, and define how your expansion project will improve your Return On Investment (ROI).

The Plan

Start by defining your visitor (not audience). Visiting a web site is a very personal experience. It's just one person, sitting in front of one screen, viewing one single page on your web site. Imagine a single prospect, visiting your web site. Jot down a description of there age, likes, dislikes, and most important, their needs. Completing this step gives you an idea of the appropriate content and how to deliver it. You'll save time and money by prioritizing or eliminating items that don't meet their immediate needs. Create a description for each type of visitor/prospect.

The next step is to match their needs with your expertise. Start with a need you defined above. List each piece of information, service, and product you could provide to meet that need. Do this for each need identified above.

Once you've identified your visitor/prospect and matched your services and products to their needs, it's time to choose the content presentation method. Below is a list of pages and functions you can use to take your site beyond the basics.

Resources

A resource page can contain a list of valuable resources your clients can use. These include links to other sites, links to your products or a top ten list of action steps.

Articles

Take the information you provide to your clients on a regular basis and turn them into articles. You can publish them to your site or have them available when needed. I have an Anti-Virus/Virus Hoax/Disaster Recovery article. It's sitting there, ready to go when I receive a virus through e-mail or a message warning of impending doom (virus Hoax).

Community of Practice

Blogs (Weblogs) allow you to create an interactive user community that builds your reputation as an industry leader and "goto" resource - TypePad.

eMarketing

Application Service Providers (ASPs) provide sophisticated e-mail marketing tools to help you build a contact database of prospects. You can use these systems to provide information "By request" anytime, anywhere. I've found a hidden gem in these systems. They allow you to provide immediate follow up for customer service requests.

eCommerce

Selling products from your site is a fast, easy way to increase your companies revenue. It hasn't always been easy, or even fast. My first experience building an eCommerce solution took lots of money and six weeks to complete. A few months later we shut down the site and started over.

Shoppingcart solutions have evolved beyond those early disasters. On a recent project, we were able to create, configure and sell products online in a single afternoon using 1ShoppingCart.

Web Based Surveys

An existing client referred me to a company who had spent 7 months and $9,000 creating an online survey system that didn't work. Using a subscription based service, we worked with them to create a web based solution. The cost of the solution? A $20.00 per month subscription fee to SurveyMonkey.

There are plenty of other web based services that provide just about any solution you can think of. The key is to define your visitors, determine their needs, then match your services to their needs.

Finish by selecting web based vendors to provide valuable web services and reasonable prices.

About the Author

Jerry Gitchel is an author, speaker and information architect who works with organizations who want to become the master of their digital domain. To access an archive of valuable articles on creating a successful web presence visit:
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