Launching a small website

The other day we had a new boiler installed in the house. The boiler man told me about this new website he had bought and asked me why he didn’t get enough visitors and conversions.

I had a look at his website and the first thing that struck me was this:
This guy had paid for the website, and still the company he got it from had put a link to their website from his website. I think this is analogues with having a haircut and the barber shaves his name in the back of your head!

When you approach a company to build a website for you, don’t let them advertise their product on your website. If they want to advertise on your website, get them to knock the price down.

I made a check list for him as an initial assessment of his website, and I thought I’d share this list with the rest of you.

When you launch your website there are a few things you can do to ramp up the traffic and get some more interest.

• Create a twitter account so your visitors can get news nuggets about your product
• Create a blog and add a link to it from your website
• Add your company to Google maps
• Create a content section on your website where you can write articles about subjects related to your product
• Remember to create “calls to action” (http://boagworld.com/design/10-techniques-for-an-effective-call-to-action)
• Create two sitemaps: An html version for your visitors, and an XML version to submit to search engines
• Submit your website to search engines
• Listen to our visitors by collecting feedback (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeoDYFUrsSw)
• Submit your website to various directories related to your product / business.