By now it is common knowledge that if a company does not have a website, it is losing many potential customers. This article will suggest tips on what you should do before you start the development of your website or upgrading your old one, so that the outcome justifies your investment.

Before approaching anyone to create your website, you must adopt the mind-set – a website is an instrument to help you attract new customers, not – everyone has a website and we need one too. Once you have taken this stance, you need to think like your potential customers so as to understand their aspirations and thus comprehend the core thing that the website should display.

Let’s take tractor sales as an example:

Action steps:

1. Approach – we sell tractors, we will create our own website which will help us sell more tractors
2. Put yourself in the position of a person who wants to buy a tractor and has arrived at a website offering tractors – what would you want to see:
   1. Tractors (that is, after all, why the person is at this website)
      1. Pictures
      2. Descriptions
      3. Prices
      4. Leasing options
   2. Contact details and the company’s location (if potential customers are interested in a particular tractor, they should have the opportunity to contact the seller)
   3. Information about the company (A tractor is, in the end, a major purchase and potential buyers will want to know about the company selling them)
   4. Promotions (Potential customers like to see that there are opportunities to get something cheaper)
   5. Services (options the potential buyer may wish to utilise for example: tractor repairs, maintenance, spare parts, delivery)

In the simplest of cases, a general purpose website needs no more than that. Naturally, there are all sorts of bits and bobs which could be added, for example, an interactive solution: a Questions and Answers section where people can submit questions about tractors, an expert responds and the answers are published on the website. To find out more about additional options, we suggest you ask your website developer who will have experience and knowledge about the options available in the internet.

When the general sections have been developed, you need to start thinking about what you will do when the website is complete.

Issues to consider, even before the website is created, about when it is completed:

1. There will be no major benefit from the website if potential customers don’t know about it, how do we resolve that?
2. How do we determine if anyone is actually visiting the website and what do potential customers find most interesting on the website?

Here are some answers to these questions:

1. There are many different ways to promote your website, for example:
   1. Tell your existing customers that you have a new website
   2. Register the new website in business directories (117.lv, viss.lv,...)
   3. Exchange website links with your cooperation partners
   4. Utilise banner promotion systems (for example adNet.lv)
   5. Utilise advertising-link promotion systems (for example textads.lv)
   6. Utilise Google AdWords options

   7. ...

Read more about promotion options in our current and future articles

Why do you need to consider these issues even before you start developing your website?

Because you need to evaluate how much money you have to spend to make your website a real business instrument, earning its keep.

1. Websites are often developed but no follow-up is done to assess how potential customers rate them. Statistics systems are used for this purpose. With the help of statistics systems, you can evaluate how visitor inflows change, a very significant factor if any promotional activities are being executed. Of course, such statistics are not enough on their own. These days, statistics systems provide a variety of options:
   1. Website traffic changes over time
   2. User loyalty – how many users return to the website repeatedly
   3. Which regions the visitors come from
   4. How visitors reached the website (directly by writing the address into the address bar, via a search engine like Google, through links on another website)
   5. Which are the most-visited sections
   6. How long users stay at the website

There are many other options, but the ones we have listed are the most important to allow you to analyse the value of a website and its content. We should mention Google analytics as one of the best systems available, and it is free.

Summary

1. Create your website from the viewpoint of potential customers
2. When planning your website development budget, allow for promotional expenditure
3. Plan to have resources available to manage the website, once it has been completed

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