Web Design in Oklahoma City

This is part five in our series on "Getting results from your website." Other articles in the series include: "part one: the website hub," "part two: the impact of design," "part three: the need for do-it-yourself content tools," "part four: the power of blogging," "part five: keeping it simple," and "part six: driving the right traffic with Internet marketing." In this article, we're going to discuss how to establish goals for your website.

Call them to action.

To truly get results from your website, you need your website visitors to do more than just browse around your web pages. A "call to action" is a basic component of any sales and marketing strategy, and since your website is likely a sales and marketing tool, it needs a call to action as well. Since a call to action represents the action you want your website visitors to take, I like to refer to it as the "goal" of your website.

What do you want me to do?

It's amazing what you can get when you simply ask. Without any call to action or goal, website visitors will simply look around a bit and then leave your site. But ask them to fill out a form and hey, they just might do it.

You need to determine what is the most important thing for your website visitors to do. Do you want them to purchase a product? Do you want them to fill out a form so you can contact them directly? Do you want them to sign up for an email newsletter? Do you want them to make a donation, sign-up for an account, download a particular file, or leave some feedback?

There are lots of actions that visitors can take on websites and you need to figure out what is the most valuable action to your organization.

Build your site around your goal. 

Once you've determined your website's goal, you need to build your site around it. You must make it extremely clear and apparent that you want the visitor to complete your action.

As an example, let's just take a look at our company website, the website you're on right now. If you look at our home page, can you tell what the goal of our website is? The large "let's talk" button right in the middle of the featured area is designed to lead visitors to our contact form so we can establish a relationship with them. On every internal page of our website, the "let's talk" button is also prominently displayed at the top of the right-hand column. You'll also find lots of other links to our contact forms contained within the content of our site pages.

Do you need to make adjustments?

So, our website's goal is getting our visitors to contact us. What's your goal? Does your site make its goal obvious? If not, how can you improve upon your site's design and content to make its goal more prominent and get your call to action in front of your website visitors?

To truly get results from your website, you need a clear and prominent call to action or goal. In our next post in this series, we'll discuss tracking results, which can only be done effectively if you have a clear goal established.