First ask these questions:

• What is your message?
• What are you trying to achieve?
• What are your business goals
• How is your website going to achieve your goals?

There is one constant in websites that is important for both the business and the potential customer to recognise; what is the message? This is the common ground between a business and it’s customer base if this is skewed in anyway money and custom can be easily lost.

Consider the Following:

How is your website aligned with your business goals?
This is important and the basis on which a companies website should be built upon. It is important that your website is aligned with your business goals. The more seamless you can make this the more success you are likely to have with your website. There is a really simple way to analyse this, go through each page of your website and ask yourself does this page meet at least one of my business goals?

Of course, with e-commerce websites you don’t need to go through every store page. That is unless each one is vastly different from the next.

Does your website have a clear purpose?
So let us now consider that you have achieved alignment with your business goals.  This is where you need to think about how your customer views your website. You may be very familiar with your website but your customer is most likely to be new to it. You want a conversion out of your customer so your customer has to understand the purpose. Make it obvious; so that customers don’t try to work it out for themselves, they will probably get it wrong.

Create Action:
Creating an action insures that you have made the “purpose” of the website clear to your potential customer and you have clearly defined the correct action (the action you want them to take). Quite simply, if the action that you want them to take is to get them to contact you, make it obvious and simple and guide them toward that goal. Remember you cannot increase the effectiveness of the website if your customer does nothing.

Relationship Focused Content:
As with any kind of trade a relationship is required to make a transaction, this is often between the sales rep and the customer. A website prevents the situation where a salesman can build rapport with the customer. As a result it is vital to focus your content on developing and enhancing the relationship with your customer. The objective is building a connection and trust between the site and the user.

Measurement:
Once again we hear the old repeated saying “you can manage what you can’t measure.” With website this has never been more true, and there are plenty of tools out there to help you. If you do not measure results how do you know if your website is meeting your business goals?

Developing your website:
First of all you could try and think about it objectively and put yourself in your customer's shoes. This is often very difficult and you are sure to have preformed opinions and accidentally make assumptions which means certain important aspects may be overlooked. Nonetheless it is a worthwhile exercise, trying to understand what your customer wants and needs from your website will never be a waste of time.

The second, and more accurate way is to form a focus group. This will create discussion, opinions will be voiced, issues identified, and hopefully you will be able to deliver a website that gives clear purpose to your customer, providing a guided and high value experience.

The third way is to seek outside help. This may well be worth considering if you are looking for an independent specialist opinion from someone who has ‘been there and done it before’. However, whatever you gain from specialist insights it is important that you make decisions for yourself and your company. No-one knows your company better than you.

Bear in mind it is always wise to employ more than one of the above processes.