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Usability Calendar 2006 – a bit late, but still very educational.

In my last post (about 3 minutes ago), I linked to an article in A List Apart that offered many useful links. One of those links was to University of Minnesota Duluth’s Information Technology Services and Systems Web Design References page.

This truly is one of the best resource sites I’ve ever seen. Highly recommended.

You’ll find some very useful links within this A List Apart article – The ALA Primer Part Two – Resources For Beginners

Do you own or operate a website? If you do, I’m sure you would like to know how to make it more successful. I’m sure you would like it to make more sales, generate more leads, produce more revenue, attract more subscribers, or whatever.

In this article I am going to reveal a very simple formula that can help you make your website more successful.

The Sure-Fire, Guaranteed Website Success Formula

Let’s cut to the chase.

If you want to make your site more successful, this is all you have to do…

1. Attract more of the right people to visit your site; and/or
2. Convince a higher percentage of these visitors to take whatever ‘desired action’ you want them to take. (i.e. improve your site’s conversion rate).

If you do both (or even just one) of these things your site will be more successful. Guaranteed. It really is that simple.

Putting The Website Success Formula Into Action

As you can see, the website success formula does not provide you with detailed ‘how to’ instructions and it certainly doesn’t offer any instant fixes.

Instead, it gives you the ‘big picture’. It provides a quick and simple reminder of the most crucially important factors that determine the success of any site.

So, is this formula of any practical use?

Absolutely. The formula starts to become useful when you adopt it as a framework for decision making.

Suppose you are considering making some changes to your site. This could be changing the background colour, or making the text size larger, or adding a new page, or modifying the checkout process, or improving the site’s accessibility. You may even be considering adding some snazzy AJAX effects, or a new Web2.0-inspired visual design.

In truth, there is an infinite amount of things you could change on your site. The challenge is deciding which things you should do?

This is where the formula comes in.

You should only make a change to your site if it will help you to either generate more traffic or improve your conversion rate.

Focus your efforts on tasks that will either get you more traffic or improve your conversion rate and your site is sure to become more successful.

So Many Questions …

The website success formula is short and simple but it generates many questions.

The most immediate questions are:

1. Who are the ‘right people’ (i.e. who is the target audience)
2. What is the ‘desired action’ you want them to take?

The answers to these questions are entirely unique to each site.

Hopefully you already know the answers. If not, you should urgently invest some time thinking hard about this matter. If you don’t know who your site is aimed at or what you want those people to do it is going to be impossible for your site to be a success.

After this, the next set of questions is:

1. How do I get (more) people to visit the site
2. How do I improve my conversion rate.

Both these topics are massive. There so many different books and blogs out there offering guidance that it can be very hard to know what to believe.

I will cover these topics in future posts on this blog, offering my own advice and suggestions with a few trade secrets thrown in for good measure. My goal is to help you to achieve more success with your own website. Subscribe to my RSS feed to receive all the latest posts.

In the meantime, I’ll finish of today’s post with an excellent link about attracting visitors to you site: How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide.

ProBlogger.Net – Group Writing Project

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