Incredible to think that in the space of 20 or so years that the number of websites has grown from a small handful in 1995 to just under 1 billion as of June 2015. In fact, the number of websites did briefly cross the 1 billion mark in 2014 when the inventor of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee Tweeted to that fact.
With such a proliferation of websites across almost every industry it should come as no surprise that having a website for your business is considered a necessity. As we provide simple online accounting software it’s no surprise then that we pay particular attention to our website and that we monitor our traffic to the site and its performance on a daily basis.
Every change, every tweak we make is considered only if it can help improve the visitor’s experience and enable them to complete the task(s) they came to the website for, be it to sign up for the 30 day free trial, download one of our handy business guides or check out one of the how-to-videos in our extensive help section.
We recently redesigned the website from top to bottom and we hope you like the finished article. If you are considering a redesign of your existing website or if you are designing a new website from scratch then please consider the following three points before permitting any webdesign agency to design and build one of you most important business tools.
1. Clarity of purpose
What’s the key task(s) visitors to your site need to accomplish? We reached out to and asked our customers and then we asked them some more. In fact, we’d a pretty good idea of what the website should deliver so as to be as useful, helpful and effective as it could be.
2. Clarity of design
Be 100% clear on how the website will look. Don’t fall prey to the ‘bells and whistles syndrome’ where you’ve a website that is totally over engineered with nice-to-have but useless features. All these features do is inhibit your visitors from completing their most important task. Their most important task should be one that leads to a business opportunity for you, be it an early stage lead or an activity that moves the visitor to a purchase, either online or offline.
3. Get it done
Agree a project plan with key milestones with your agency. If you are clear about points 1 and 2 then getting it done is a lot easier. In fact, it should be pretty much plain sailing.
The most commonly used button on the Internet is the back button – visitors accidentally landing on websites but more often than not, landing on websites that they might buy from but the clarity of purpose and design is askew.
Check out our new website. We believe it goes a long way to meeting points 1 and 2 and that it delivers a pretty good user experience for business owners looking for online accounts software.
