Website Basics

Before you load your first image or contact a web professional,  decide on the purpose of your website. Make sure you know:

You are the best person to answer these questions. No consultant can know your business like you do.

Target market: Who is your site for?

When considering your target market, please don’t say ‘anyone who will buy my gear’. Knowing your target market will help you design a site that appeals to them. Are your regular customers:

  • predominantly men or women?
  • of a particular age group?
  • businesses or consumers?
  • local, national or international?
  • people with particular interests, eg fishing, motorbikes, cookery?
  • homeowners or parents?
  • Facebook or Twitter users?

Once you know who your customers are, decide on the images and text that will appeal to them. For example, if you are a tourism business that appeals to young families, include images of children and parents having fun. Make sure your site shows that you are child-friendly. Try and answer the questions that parents will ask, eg ‘Do I have to pay for my toddler?’ Post information on your site that will interest parents, eg other child-friendly activities in your area, and share it on Facebook.

Key messages: What do you want people to know about your business?

Key messages are information that might convince a customer to buy your product or service. They are your selling points. Here are our key messages:

Complexity

  • There is a lot to consider in a marketing campaign
  • We can guide you through it
  • Your marketing is more effective if you have an integrated strategy

Online marketing

  • Requires regular activity
  • We can teach you how to do it, or do it for you
  • Can be tracked and assessed

Expertise

  • We are experts
  • We know a lot about marketing, print, IT, websites, social media and running a small business
  • We understand that business owners are busy and it can be hard to stand back and assess your business. We can give you an outside perspective.

Service

  • We will learn about your business
  • We provide good, responsive service
  • We take the stress out of marketing
  • We can do as much or as little as you want

Price

  • We are affordable for regional businesses
  • We can design a strategy to meet your budget
  • Online marketing is cheap compared to print marketing
  • Your marketing should pay for itself many times over. We can help you decide what is and isn’t working.

What are your key messages? It’s worth spending time here because your key messages will determine the content of your website, leaflets, social media posts and emails.

Goals: How will your business benefit from a website?

Be very clear about what you want to achieve. Here are some suggestions:

  • Selling product online
  • Asking people to join a mailing list
  • Encouraging people to phone you
  • Telling people where you are

Once you know what you want your website to do, make sure you have a clear ‘Call to Action’ to guide readers towards your goal. The ‘Get Quote’ button on Webhive’s Service and Prices page is an example of a call to action. It takes visitors to the Services a page that describes what we do.

Once you know your website’s goal you can work out how to measure your website’s effectiveness and how to capitalise on your investment.