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How To Build A Web Site That Sells

By Herman Drost

Have you ever set off in the car to your destination, without a map, naively believing you will find it? Several frustrating hours later, you are either lost or stressed out. Your wife says, "I told you so - you should have brought the map!"

This is the same situation when you create a web site without planning. The end result will be an unclear purpose, target market goals and structure. Ultimately, you will lose visitors and end up with little or no sales.

Let's look at each of these points:

Define Your Purpose

Without a clear purpose for your site, you will not know where you are heading. For example, the purpose of my design site, is to help small business owners attain a presence on the web to sell their product or service. Now, write down the statement of purpose for your web site. Go over it a few times to make sure it is crystal clear, otherwise your customers will be trying to figure it out for themselves.

Research Your Target Market

Research the product or service you wish to sell. Find out if it has a good niche (egg a product or service nobody else has thought of), or it has a strong demand (many people are searching for it). Do a search on some of the major search engines (egg Yahoo, Overture) for keywords and phrases that you think people will be using when looking for your product. Now you can see what kind of demand there is for it.

Realize many others may be competing to sell the same product. Focus on something unique you may have to offer, that stands out from your competitors. If you are setting up an affiliate program, make sure it is a reputable company with a good track record with lots of help available from others involved. Don't recklessly jump in - you will waste a lot of time and money. This is the number one reason, why many entrepreneurs give up so quickly.

Set Your Goals

Create a timeline for the planning, building and marketing of your site. Without doing this, procrastination may take over your goals. Decide how much money you want to spend to create your site and how much you will invest for its promotion.

Set a target date for what you want your site to achieve - you can always adjust it if you need to. Make a goal for how many visitors you will attract to your site. What percentage of these will be actual sales? When do you expect to make a profit?

Choose a Domain Name

Look up available domain names for your business, by using Nameboy. They will provide a large list to choose from. Keep your domain name as short as possible, so it is easy to remember. Avoid hard to spell words. Also avoid words with hyphens in them, because people won't remember to add the hyphens and may end up at your competitor's site.

Mindmapping - How to Sketch Out Your Site

This is the process that allows you to structure ideas on paper in the logical order your brain follows, rather than the linear process normally used when forming ideas.

Take one sheet of paper, draw a circle in the middle - this is the subject of your homepage. From there, draw branches, which have more ideas about your topic. If any topics are related in a more definitive way, create another branch off the current idea branch. Within minutes, you will see your mindmap develop into a dynamic sketch. You might find that a standard sheet of paper is not enough to contain all your thoughts. Use more paper, create more branches, and keep the ideas flowing.

With a clear purpose, definite target market, targeted goals, a domain name and a clear structure, you are now ready to begin building the pages for your successful web site.

Searching for information on the Web has recently become like a mine field. You find the site you want, only to be greeted by pop-ups when you enter, pop-ups when you are on the site and pop-ups when you leave. Other sites use a flash introduction, make you wait several minutes (which feels like hours), until the page finishes loading. Heck, you just want to find the information as swiftly as possible without having to watch out for these mine fields.