Last week I wrote about the three most basic models you can use to get your business online – as in, to get a website.

When most people first think of creating a website, they think about how it is going to look. Design is important, for sure.

But it’s not the only thing.

Imagine someone serves you a plate of food that looks absolutely exquisite….

….But tastes awful.

Are you going to want to eat their food again?

Or, try another scenario: You buy a book because the cover is really stylish, and you like the look of the illustrations inside.

But when you start to read, the sentences are not quite ordered right, and nothing makes sense…

Do you finish the book? Even if you did… Do you understand the message?

Three things that make a website work…

It’s the same with your website… No matter how good it looks, if it doesn’t function well, or doesn’t make sense to the visitor, they are not going to engage with your message, or buy what you are offering.

So, there are three things that come together to make a website work – good content, good design and good functionality (it needs to be technically sound).

Good Content

I talked about some of the basics of good content in my last post, and you can also get that here in Creating Heart-Centred Websites. But here’s a quick recap:

This website needs to be somewhere where your potential customers can easily find out:

• Who you help
• How your product/ service can help them
• What your product / service is
• What they will get with it
• What they need to give for it (what kind of commitment is required from them)
• What it will cost
• Why it’s a worthwhile investment for them
• How to purchase / say yes now
• How to stay in touch if they are not ready now but might be interested later
• How to get more info if they still have questions.

Oh yeah… And a bit about who you are and what brought you to this business (or why you’re so passionate about it) doesn’t hurt either!

Good Design

Your website needs to present certain info in an intuitive or predictable way so that your potential customers can find the information they need about what you offer.

You want your website to stand out, and a professional designer can help you with that. They add the special touches that make the difference between “okay” and “beautiful”…

For example, Trisha (who thinks Design Rules the Universe) recently gave her own website a makeover.

When I saw it, I couldn’t help falling in love with the way she’d used those little orange leaves to tie in the blog posts with the rest of the site. Aren’t they gorgeous?

But funky design should never compromise on usability. The design of your website should also make it user-friendly in a practical way. Here’s some things to consider:

• Legible font. That means go for larger and darker (black even). Especially if your customers are baby boomers and likely to be wearing reading glasses when they browse the web. You’ll also need to use web-friendly fonts. Otherwise, if a visitor to your site doesn’t have your fancy font on their computer, it could look ugly.
• All the links need to work. That means proof-read your website, and check the links… So your visitors don’t get the dreaded “Error 404: Page Not Found”. Or worse, as I recently experienced on one disorienting website, the confusion of clicking to go somewhere and end up somewhere else.
• Your menu needs to be easy to find and understand. If you really have to think of clever and original names for “home” “contact” and “about me/us” (which you really don’t, but anyway…) make sure it’s still really obvious what you mean. Just like every shop has a front door in a predictable place, your website needs to be easy to navigate.
• Responsible use of graphics. People don’t want to wait around for pictures to load before they can read what you are on about. Make sure your pictures are the right size for a website before you upload them. And ask yourself, do you really need pretty, flashy videos or an almost-blank “Welcome” page before your visitors even enter your site? If you really think you do (again, I think you don’t but anyway… ) give people an immediately accessible option to skip the flashy bits if they don’t want to wait around for it to load.

Good Functionality

Basically, to function well and be technically sound, your website should feature:

• Content management. That means you can update pages yourself without needing to pay your web developer each time you want to add or change something or fix a typo.
• An easy-to-use interface. They call this WYSIWYG. It means – What You See Is What You Get (pronounced wizzee-wig). If your content-management uses a WYSIWYG interface, you can easily edit your pages the same way you would a word document, without having to learn any special code.
• Search engine friendly. Obviously, this is important to help people find your website. There’s plenty of places you can learn about the ins and outs of this – content, links, tags, meta-tags… and I’m gonna get back to you with the best heart-centred sources soon
• Reports. With an analytics program, like Google Analytics, you can track who is visiting your site, and what they are clicking on, which is helpful for evaluating your marketing methods, fine-tuning your content, finding bugs and (hopefully) having that warm-fuzzy feeling that people are actually visiting your website.

There’s a few other issues you want to make sure your developer is taking care of – the coding needs to be clean, the server capacity needs to be big enough to manage your expected visitors and any downloads they might make from your site, and a related issue might be how you manage and host your emails. But I’m gonna leave it there for now because this is a blog post, not a treatise on website development.

Where do you learn this stuff?

So, as you can see, there’s always more to learn in the wild world of websites, but hopefully this has made things a little clearer to start.

I learned a lot of this stuff by reading books, blogs and free downloads from people who focus on the various different aspects of website content, design and functionality.

I learned a lot from trial and error (I’ve had four websites in the last five years… In the process, I’ve learned what to do and what not to do, and watched how fast things change in the world of web development).

And I learned a lot from my friend and most-understated-but-don’t-be-fooled-he’s-actually-awesome web developer, Wes… (his own website doesn’t say enough about how great he is, so if you need help with your site, you’d be better to send him an email or give him a cal).

Some other great resources for heart-centred website advice: Trisha Cupra from Blue Owl Web Design Makeovers, Caroline Dean from WellSites, and Wendy from Your Web Coaches.

Or, if you have a web developer who you know and trust, talk to them.

Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear your views…