If more business owners and marketing teams asked this question before they embarked on their website-building adventure, the Web would be a much better palce to be. They ought to ask questions such as "What makes a website great?" or "How do I ensure my Web design company builds me a great site?" Don’t let that be the fate of your business website. Follow time-proven, specific rules and make sure that your site has these exact qualities.

Great Website Rules

A website needs to...

• Establish trust.
• Make the visitor’s life better in some way.
• Offer the visitor a clean, simple and easy experience.
• Avoid making the user think unnecessarily.
• Make you and your business look professional.
• Clearly show your visitors the way to accomplish their goals without being confusing.
• Help visitors easily find what they need and then ask them to take an action.
• Pass the AIDA test: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
  

If you expect to accomplish your website goals and make money with your website, follow these rules with every page on your site. Let’s take a closer look at each of these important rules,
why they need to be followed, and how to do it.

A website needs to establish trust

One of the biggest roadblocks users need to hurdle is the trust factor. The Web can be a cold, nameless, faceless landscape. The newness of the Web also contributes to a low level of trust. Typing in your credit card number and sending it off into cyberspace without ever speaking to someone requires a leap of faith.

If a website seems untrustworthy, people are not likely to buy from you online. They will also be less likely to offer you their contact information if you ask for it. You can establish trust in many ways. First, you can be sure there are no spelling or grammar mistakes and no broken links. If you’re perceived as being careless with your site, then you may very well be careless with your products, services, customer service, returns and anything else that you do.

A website needs to make the visitor’s life better in some way

If your site helps your visitors achieve their goals, find what they want, learn something new, and add to their world without frustrating them, then you’re headed in the right direction. Ask yourself if your site adds to each visitor’s life or takes away from it. If you frustrate users, insult them, or waste their time, you’re missing the mark. We’ll investigate this more in the next couple of rules.

A website needs to clearly show your visitors the way to accomplishing their goals without being confusing

Web users are goal orientated. They visit a site to get something done. It may be that they need information. They may be researching a product, service or company. Or they could be ready to buy something. Understand in advance what your website visitors need to accomplish when they arrive at your site. Once you understand this, it’s your job to ensure they can do it easily, simply, quickly, without having to think. Don’t make your site confusing.

A website needs to help visitors easily find what they need and then ask them to take an action

Since Web users are goal orientated, it’s vital to give them clear and simple ways in which they can take the various actions they want to take. Unless you ask visitors to take an action, you’re wasting your efforts. Even if you simply offer information and don’t sell anything online, you’re leaving dollars on the table if you don’t ask them for their contact information to market to them later.

But in order for them to get to the point of taking an action, they need to find it first. Make the path easy for them. While working to be sure that the link followers can find information easily on your site, be sure to make your navigation system self-evident and simple to use. Think of your website as a retail store. When customers enter the front door of the store they need to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. They follow signs hanging over the aisles or ask an employee to lead them to their goal. The store owners have organized their space to funnel people through the store in a way that maximizes sales. They place the bestselling items up front, they make the items on sale obvious, and they put the impulse items near the checkout, just to name a few examples.

Your site needs to do the same. Make the signs to the various sections clear and easy to follow. Make the site’s search function easy to use. Provide feedback for the actions they take. Don’t lead them down dead ends with no way to get back. Since people in a real store can generally sense where they are located at all times in relation to the rest of the store, such as the front door, and since this gives them a sense of direction while wandering the store, it’s fairly easy for customers to find their way around. A website is different, there is no sense of direction or location. So it’s your job to provide one. Making the site’s navigation consistent on every page helps.

A good book to read about the subject of retail stores and customer behavior is Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy. A website should offer the visitor a clean, simple and easy experience. We’ve already considered this one at length and will look at it some more soon. When building each page, always ask yourself if you’re providing the cleanest, simplest and easiest way for visitors to accomplish their goals. Needless to say, their goals and your goals ought to line up.

They want to find and buy a widget that fits their needs and you want them to buy that widget and tell their friends. If they perceive the entire experience in a good light, they are more likely to see it through to the end and buy from you, more likely to come back to buy more, and more likely to tell their friends. A website should not make the user unnecessarily think. One of my favorite Web design and usability bibles is called Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. The title says it all.

This is such a simple concept, but way too many websites miss it completely. Steve Krug likens website visitors to motorists on the highway driving sixty miles per hour. Your website is just like the billboards that line the road. People don’t read every word you include on your site, nor do they read directions because they don’t feel they have the time. An easier and simpler website is just a click away. If you make someone have to think to use your site, they’ll leave.

Krug says to make things self-evident or at least self-explanatory. Follow established Web conventions. It’s a long-standing Web convention to make clickable words blue and underlined. I am amazed at sites that include links that are the same color as the rest of the text and are not underlined. It’s like an Easter egg hunt to find a working link on these sites. Don’t do this. Don’t try to be cute.

Don’t let your Web designer talk you into being different because “it looks cool.” You’re trying to make money by making your website visitors’ lives easy, not by being “cool.” If I start to feel like I don’t know how to use a site, or I start to get confused at the functionality, I simply click the back button and try another site. After all, there’s no shortage of other websites out there that can most likely meet my needs. People scan or just glance at your website pages. They stay on a page for mere seconds and if the way in which they want to accomplish their goals is not painfully obvious, they leave.

A website needs to make you and your business look professional

A website can be designed and presented in such a way that a sole proprietor will seem equal to companies with hundreds of employees. Be sure the site is clean and its architecture is well thought out. Be sure you don’t have spelling or grammar mistakes, and weed out all broken links. Make every page’s navigation, colors and look-and-feel consistent. Use the best graphics you can.

A website needs to pass the AIDA test: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

As I’ve mentioned many times already, the online world is no different from the “real” world when it comes to human behavior and buying. A successful sale depends on attracting the Attention of prospective buyers, it needs to stimulate their Interest, then their Desire to buy. Then it needs to require them to take an Action such as making the purchase. The world of sales has known this long before the emergence of the Web. The sales process needs to pass the AIDA test online as well.

Every page of your site needs to attract the attention of the visitor long enough to stimulate interest. Then the page needs to create a strong desire in the visitor to take action. For the visitor to take the action it needs to be clearly defined and easy to do. Finally, the action taken needs to result in satisfaction by providing the visitor with a result that is exactly what was expected.

If you have an e-commerce storefront or you have a page that offers a free demo of your product in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, ask yourself, “Is it self-evident and easy for my visitors to find these pages? Do I establish trust on my site that allows visitors to feel comfortable buying from me or giving me their contact information? Does the home page clearly point people to these pages? Does the site make it easy for visitors, regardless of which page they entered by, find these pages? Do these pages clearly ask visitors to take an action? Do these pages pass the AIDA test?”