A Beautiful Website Only Lasts for 30 Seconds

First, let’s define the purpose of your website. What is the objective of your website?

• Do you want to create a website that is frequently used and popular?
• Do you want to generate income from your website and make it as a profit center year after year after year?

When a visitor drops by to your website, you only have 30 seconds to get their attention to involved with your company. Some studies suggests only 7 seconds.

How much money and time that you have spend on your website?

And all you get is 30 seconds if ever some visitors come to your website.

Then you really need to grab your visitors fast just like catching fishes with your bare hands .

Why this happens? And how I can improve on this?

The primary reason why people visit a website is to obtain specific information.

The primary reason for them to revisit the same website over and over again is not because of its beauty or cosmetic but the practicality or usability aspect of it.

Website usability is based on several factors:

1. How much relevant information is available
   The more information that is relevant to the visitor, the higher its usability is. For example, an online encyclopedia or Wikipedia is world famous due to its high usability in terms of relevant information.
2. Information Timeliness
   Outdated information equals to useless information. Therefore a website will naturally be more usable if the information is updated consistently.
3. Social Interaction
   The website can also serve as a medium for social interactions such as chatting, communication via text, voice and video. Such interaction can be delayed or real-time.

Also, let’s look at the types of websites commonly found today:

• Website as an online brochure
  • These are most common for small businesses. The usability is up to the information posted on the website only.
  • Your visitors may visit your website once or twice just for the address or telephone number.
• Content Management websites
  • When more information is published and housekeeping is required frequently, a CMS or Content Management System will help. It organizes information into articles or pages, easy search, retrieval and authoring of documents just like typing an email to the website.
• Lead-generation websites
  • Such sites are mainly used for attracting traffic and then creating interests to convert them to potential buyers.
• E-commerce sites
  • These are sites that visitors can make purchases online, usually with guided systems such as shopping cart with credit card payment gateways.
• Self-service sites
  • These sites are the most usable sites. It allows visitors to perform certain activity or transactions in the site, usually requires visitor to register as a user first. A good example would be online banks, web forums, web-mails and more.
  • Such website is one of the best as companies like Google, Yahoo and similar ones only focus their R&D on such sites and this makes them highly profitable.
• What’s next?

In the following posts, I will discuss this in more detail. Stay tuned!

Tags: strategic planning, website