What makes a successful Web site?

To move forward in life, everyone needs to have goals. Well, websites are no different. You must define your website’s goals by asking yourself two questions:

• Who do I want to visit my website?
• What do I want them to do once they are there?

These answers alone will place you heads and tails above your competition. We know that this sort of soul searching is not the easiest but we promise that if you do, your content management system website will be built on a solid foundation. Don’t worry if you are having trouble defining the purpose of your website; we help people every day. Your content managed website’s ultimate purpose may be to shorten your sales cycle or to provide educational information to your visitors, no matter what; we will team up with you to put your aspirations into a purpose that will go to work for you.

Once you are armed with the purpose of your site, you are ready to start building one. There are many critical aspects to a successful content management system website and all of them will be directly impacted by your site’s purpose.

Building a Successful Content Management System Website with Smart Solutions

Structure
If the purpose of your site is the foundation, then the structure of you site is the framing. We build content management system websites with sound programming and a well-planned framework, taking into account the goals of your site. Your website’s purpose will directly determine its organization.

There are many ways to structure/organize a website. Just take a look at nytimes.com as compared to hersheys.com. Different purposes call for different ways to organize. Your content management system site needs to have an intuitive design for your target market. You want your site’s visitors to feel right at home and be able to easily navigate. Part of creating a successful website is making sure that when your visitors want something (especially if they want to purchase) that it is extremely easy and quick for them to get it.

Design
We view design as the overall emotional experience visitors use to judge your site. As we all know, people can be a little judgmental and we all want to make a good impression. Your content management system website needs to make a good impression to your target market in the first 30 seconds. To make a good impression for our clients we employ color theory, exceptional photography, and stellar imagery. We pay special attention to seamlessly integrating our customer’s website design with their current marketing materials and collateral; making your content management system website the newest marketing tool in your company’s arsenal.

Content
Relevant content is perhaps the second most important facet of your content management system website, after its purpose. Relevant content, is content that has a purpose and a call-to-action. Every page of your site needs to have a purpose and a call-to-action. Without relevant content, your site will not rank well on the search engines. If your site does not rank well, it will be difficult for people to discover it.

At Smart Solutions, we consider search engines to be equally important to your human visitors because if you are good to the search engines they will bring loads of visitors to you. While relevant content for the search engines (keyword density) is extremely important it cannot be at the expense of human-friendly content. We help you strike a balance between writing content for both search engines and your human visitors.

Our custom content managment system will help you to get your content online as soon as it is ready.  No more waiting for the one person who knows html in your company; you can post relevant, timely content with the click of a button. 

Usability & Accessibility
The fact is every person visiting your site does not have the same circumstance. Some of your visitors are going to have high–speed, wireless internet connections, while others are going to have dial-up. Dial-up users are going to have a significantly slower load time; this reality has to be taken into consideration in the creation of your site. Some people have not installed their Flash plug-in; others don’t use Internet Explorer as their web browser, and still others are visually impaired. Determining your target audience guides the site’s usability. We take all of these circumstances into account while building your content management system website and make accommodations when we can.

Internet Marketing
In keeping with the building metaphor, Internet marketing is the roof. During the building process, every aspect requires consideration of the roof. The same is true for Internet marketing. The foundation, structure, design, content, and usability of your content management system site should all be created with Internet marketing in mind. “If you build it, they will come” is a common misconception. You have to tell your target market about your site and continue to keep telling them to get them to come.

Search engine optimization, qualified traffic, e-mail marketing, blogs, podcasts, and white papers combine together to create the huge umbrella of Internet marketing. We begin Internet marketing at the creation of your content management system site; starting with your goals, study of your industry and your competition, and then we create a comprehensive recommendation to you, telling you where you should allocate your resources. Not every aspect of Internet marketing is for every website. Again, different purposes call for different means.

Technical
At Smart Solutions we provide our customers with personal, direct customer service; reliable internet hosting and the technology to grow their websites. We also assist many of our clients in selecting and registering an optimal domain name, to ensure that it is in alignment with their website’s goals.

Elements of a Successful Website

There are many elements of a successful content management system website. Just like a tree, some of a website’s elements are visible and some are invisible. This illustration reveals the visible and invisible elements.

Visible Elements
Call-to-Action
Images
Content

Invisible Elements
Solid Programming
Well Planned Framework
Branded Design
Usability
Search Engine Optimization
Internet Marketing
ISP Services
Accessibility
Quality Assurance



Important Website truths

• People will judge your company by your website in just 30 seconds or less.
• Most people only look at the first couple of words in a sentence and only read on if they are engaged by those words.
• The most powerful word in the English language is YOU. Second person material is most effective for the web. People want to know what you are going to do for them.