Designing a website is easy. However, designing a website that generates tangible results (i.e. new customers, new members, engagement, etc.) is no picnic.

It requires experience. And lots of education.

While experience is something you cannot read up in a book, I’d attempt to close the knowledge gap with this blog post based on my 10+ years of experience as a web designer in Nigeria.

So how do you ensure that your company/organization’s new website is going to generate positive results? How do you turn your website into a powerful sales machine that markets your brand 24/7 without rest… even while you sleep

There are 4 simple but extraordinary secret tips I’m going to reveal to you today.

The first tip is for you to;

 

1. Have a measurable and quantifiable primary goal before you start creating a website

Your website shouldn’t just be a digital format of your brochure. It should be a tool for achieving one specific (or set of) goals for your business or organization.

Is your primary goal to;

– Generate new leads for your business?

– Generate more members for your organization?

– An avenue for establishing your company as a thought leader in your industry?

or

-is it a platform for engaging with clients and addressing complaints?

Whatever your primary goal or KPI is, it must be quantifiable for you to know whether your website is useful or not.

Don’t make assumptions. When you are about to start development or hire a professional web design company to handle your project (BTW, click here if you want to hire my web design agency), make sure you bring up and address this matter squarely.

 

2. Have a game plan with regards to how you want to publicize the website to your ideal target customers.

When it comes to having a website, “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply. You have to go out there to market and publicize it aggressively.

And you do this even before you start designing the website.

There are 3 easy ways you can promote your website;

1. Search engine optimization (i.e. optimizing your website to rank no. 1,2 or 3 when people search for related keywords in Google?). e.g. if you are a dentist, and someone searches Google for “best dentists in Lagos”, your website will float to the top as the no.1 option
2. Through paid advertisement i.e. Pay per click (PPC) advertisement.
3. Through word of mouth (including physical fliers, billboards, etc.)

Your plan for attracting visitors will inform how your website is going to be designed and what emphasis will be placed. E.g. If the primary plan for attracting visitors is SEO, then your website has to be content-rich with important keywords carefully placed as header tags in strategic positions on the website. Nothing is left to chance when doing this.

If on the other hand, you want to buy traffic through PPC advertisement, then, your site must have carefully designed landing pages with the aim of converting visitors to leads/customers.

The golden rule is: A homepage is to inform, whereas, a landing page is to sell.

The landing page is what you advertise via PPC and not just your website homepage.

Learn more about landing pages here

 

3. Optimize your website to be capable of converting visitors into customers easily

Have you heard of the term CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION?

Well if you have and understand it good for you. If you don’t, and you intend to launch or have already launched a website, then you are in trouble.

After you attract visitors to your website, what next?

Is your website carefully optimized to convert those visitors into customers or leads.

CRO is a process of positioning your website content in such a way that it is interactive enough for visitors to take action.

These actions may be

• To buy a product on your website
• To sign up or subscribe to a service or product on your website
• To fill out the contact form or even just to place a call to your business

Whatever your goal for having a website is, that is what will inform the how/what you will optimize your website for.

For example, on this website, since we don’t sell our services online to clients, we optimize the website for people to Request for Proposal or to speak with our team. We then hold a brief meeting with the prospect and show them how we can help them out with their website design project. We add that it is FREE to encourage the people to take action.

So optimizing your website is extremely important, if not, you would practically be wasting your money and energy sending people to your site.

 

4. Securing your website against hackers

Over 10+ million websites are hacked every year.

You wouldn’t want yours to be one of them, would you?

The first thing you do is to install an SSL certificate to your website hosting. These days, having SSL on your website is no longer an option. It’s compulsory.

Most browsers will flag your non-SSL website as insecure and inform your visitors about it.

You will agree no one wants to surf a website that is NOT secure.

Then install simple plugins like Loginizer to secure your website against brute-force hacking – That is if your website is built using WordPress).

For those using WordPress and other CMS, you also need to obfuscate (i.e. hide) your administrator login page so those hacking robots can’t have access to your backend. This will save you SQL injection headaches.

I’d stop here with the issue of website security because it is beyond the scope of this blog post. But I think I have pointed out the most basic ones you should know.

Finally, if you want to create an effective high converting website, simply take your time to get your acts right with regards to the 3 issues I have pointed out. Once you do these things above, you have 90% assurance/guarantee that your website is going to be a very useful income-generating asset instead of a money-consuming liability.

All the best as you implement what you have learned in this blog post.

 

Interested in Launching a New Website or Redesigning Your Existing site?

Request Web Design Proposal OR Talk to Someone Right Away – 09034244099

We will show you exactly what needs to be done for you to launch a High Converting Website That Will Help Your Business or organization grow rapidly

 

About the Author: Dr. Smart Okpi is the Creative Director and CEO of eBrand and has over 12 years of experience in web design and digital marketing.