Website Content for Small Businesses: What Should Be on Your Website

Website Content for Small Businesses: What Should Be on Your Website

Is your small business web site ineffective as it is? Or, are you taking the leap onto the world wide web for the first time? Either way, you're searching for the answer to the question, "what does an effective website contain?" Well, there is no simple answer to this question, as I'm sure you already know. However, I can provide some steps to help you evaluate your site's purpose--knowing a website's purpose is essential for developing effective content.

What is your site's purpose?
If you don't know what you want your website's visitors to do once they're there, your site, more than likely, does not have a clear purpose. By answering the following questions, you should be able to narrow down your reasons for having a site:

Does or do you want your site to encourage potential customers to contact you (via e-mail, phone or contact us form)?

Does or do you want your site to offer tools or resources for visitors (calculators, forums, downloadable information, etc...)? And if so, why?

Does or do you want your site to provide information about your company? About your industry?

Does or do you want your site to sell products?

Does or do you want your site to collect information from visitors (e-mail addresses, mailing addresses)?

Once you answered each question, you can evaluate content needs.

Encouraging Contact
If you want potential customers to contact you, you must encourage them to do so. How, you ask?

Tell them to and have your phone number on every page.
Ask them to send you their address and phone number for more information via a sign up form. Have a link to this form on every page.
List an e-mail address that they can send questions to. Have this information on every page.

You'll notice the "on every page" aspect of each of these options. If you want visitors to contact you, the way to do so needs to be easy to find. Your text on each page should also refer visitors to the contact option as well so they know exactly what you want them to do.

Tools and Resources
If you have information or a forum or some other tools or resources you want your visitors to use, make sure they are aware of their existence and that people know how to use them. Different tools require different kind of promotion (for example, a forum needs to be monitored and questions and comments need to be responded to; where a tool for calculating the cost of building a deck just needs instructions and a "what to do with this information" description).

Make sure visitors know not only where these tools are, but also why they are there and how their use will benefit them. Don't just add functionality for functionality's sake