Traffic is King, Content is Queen!

Tony Bartlett | Date:

Sunday, 3 February 2008

It's important when first planning to develop your website that you have a clear set of objectives to work with. You need to be able to measure the performance of your website by pre-determined criteria.

Planning essentials include:

Who is your website targeting?
What do you expect to gain from your website?
How will you know if your website is a success?

A good corporate website must:

Clearly reflect your corporate image and branding
Clearly relate what you do and why your customers should do business with you
Lead visitors to a clear call to action

TIP: It's much better to have a smaller "completed" site that can be added to as you go, rather than a bigger site with areas "under construction".

Finally -- and vitally -- on the Internet, traffic is the King - attracting new visitors is one thing (check the 'See Also' panel to the right for more information about attracting first time visitors), but encouraging visitors to return is another thing entirely.

The best way to attract return traffic is to offer engaging interactive functionality; eBAY, YouTube and MySpace are successful examples of engaging web sites. Selling products and services online is also great way to engage customers and encourage return traffic.

Unfortunately most of us don't have the budget to publish websites with the functionality of eBAY, and many businesses offer products and services that are just not practical to sell online.

In this case, the most logical way to encourage return traffic is to update your website content regularly.

Unless your business has in-house website programmers, the most cost-effective way to regularly update your website is to use an integrated Content Management System (CMS).

Learn more about Content Management via the IASP CMS.