Five things to think about: Your business website

It’s not enough to just have a business website. Having a web presence in and of itself is all well and good, but it has to add to your bottom line.

That’s business, right? It’s about making money, and if it’s working right, your website should make money for you, in the form of new customers, new clients, or enhanced opportunities to connect with existing customers and clients.

Augusta Free Press has designed more than 600 websites for businesses and nonprofits across the United States, and over the course of nearly a decade of working with business and nonprofit clients, we’ve developed a checklist that we follow to make sure that our sites are best positioned to make them money.

The Checklist

• What to include: It might seem to go without saying, but basic contact info (address, phone, email) should be highlighted, i.e. easy to find. That’s basic and elemental. From there, you need to think through what you hope to achieve with your website. Do you want to sell directly to customers online? Or is your aim to get them to your location, or to call or email? The answer to those questions will determine how you need to lay things out from there.
• SEO: Search engine optimization. You need to make it easy for Google, Bing and the rest to direct people to your website. Which is to say, you can’t just build it, and hope people will come.
• Calls to action: Once you settle on layout, what information you need to include on the site, and make sure that you make it easy for people to contact you, you might think you’re ready to go to make money online. You’re not. People come to your site, see what you have to sell, see that they can contact you. Now it’s on you to get them to act.
• Use your website to collect new customer information: You don’t want to work hard to get people to your business website and then have them be one-offs. There are strategies for collecting information on visitors to your website that can allow you to be able to connect with them again in the future.
• The money page: This is the most important page on your website. It might be where you make items available for sale online. It might be where you direct people to connect with you online to get a quote for services that you offer. It’s probably not the front page of your site.

Class Schedule: Tuesday, June 9, noon-1 p.m.

Augusta Free Press will cover these topics in depth in our Websites 101 class.

Classes are offered at Panera Bread in Waynesboro.

For more information on website and marketing classes offered by AFP, click here.