Have you read advertising offering Robust Websites and thought "I need one of those!" and then "Wonder what it is?" Not everyone needs a 'robust' website, but in order to make the decisions here's a rundown of what a robust website comprises. Oh, and Goodwin Studios can build you the website you want, be it robust or otherwise.

One of the major determining factors of whether or not a website is powerful and robust is if the website gets a lot of visitors. The concept is, once you have the traffic, the sales will come, since sales is a law of numbers. There are some things that you can do to increase traffic to a website and also generate more sales from that traffic.

Widgets

Your visitors will like to interact with things on the website. Widgets are fun. Weather, Polls, News feed, twitter feed, facebook feed. Blog links. Some of these widgets require more participation on your part - a facebook feed is only good if you update your facebook page regularly for example. A news feed is only worthy if you post news regularly. You and your webmaster will take a good look at your internet habits and come up with widgets that suit your online lifestyle.

Information / Content

Include a description of your products and services that leave the website visitor fully informed. By doing so, you are making the website customer-friendly. Don't add so many widgets that you forget the main purpose of your website which is to inform the public about your product. Also, Google likes content. If your site is widget-heavy but missing relative content, Google won't index you as well as it could.

Email List

Provide an option on your site for your visitors to sign up for your website's emailing list. By obtaining email addresses, you can stay in contact with your website visitors by letting them know about new specials or discounts that are being offered on your website. You can use a 3rd party services such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact at very reasonable rates. But before you commit to an email list, be sure you're prepared to send out newsletters or messages of value to your customer.

Feedback

Integrate a customer feedback form on your site so the customers can easily relay feedback to you. Whenever obtaining information from your customers, be sure to ask them how they heard about your site. This will let you know where your traffic is coming from, which is powerful information for marketing purposes. As well, you can install Google Analytics on your website which will help you further analyze traffic.

Share

Make sure people can share your articles and content on facebook or other social media. The advent of 'sharing' is brililant and turns the internet into one bit word-of-mouth water cooler. Be sure you're part of the gossip!

Be Available

Provide a telephone number and email address that will allow your customers to contact you. Create an auto-responder for your email addresses so that when the customers email you, they will receive an immediate response letting them know that their message has been received and how long they can expect to wait before hearing from you.

Ease of Payment

Create a payment gateway on your website that accepts credit cards. This will ensure that you are not missing out on sales simply because a person does not have the proper method of payment. Use paypal - it takes all kinds of credit cards and instantly converts different currencies. Customers do not have to have a paypal account to pay using paypal. Even if you don't have an online store, this is good advice. You can create invoices in Paypal and send them to your client, who will be able to pay at the click of a button. No more excuses!

Optimize your download time

Avoid using large images on your website, since the large images can cause longer downloading times for your web pages - or make sure your web designer optimizes the image for web. You don't want the customer to get impatient and leave your site while waiting for your images to download. Also make sure that the images you do use are of professional quality and properly represent your products and services. Don't use Flash - for so many reasons. It does not index well on search engines. Apple doesn't read flash on any of its mobile devices (iphone, ipod, ipad). It's often tacky and takes too long to load. A good web designer can give you what you want without flash (javascript, html5).

Search Engine Optimization

Google has changed the game over this past year and it is now easier than ever before to be well-indexed by this premium search engine. Goodwin Studios designs SEO into every website project.

Alternative to Robust?

Some businesses might choose to not include news feeds, blogs, and social media on their website. "I'm just not online enough to maintain all that." you might say. Not to worry. You can still have a 'robust' website without everything listed above. The secret is to create a website that visitors will find easily and enjoy. Good navigation. great SEO, easy to find contact information, and great content.

It's that easy

Last changed: Jan 29 2012 at 4:35 PM

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