If you’re about to design or redesign your website, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and consider what design choices would be appreciated by your potential customers.

Just because you love the thought of a cute animal walking across the bottom of your website… does not necessarily mean your customers will concur.

Make sure that when a customer does business with you through your website, you keep them informed about what’s going on. For example:

• If they fill out an enquiry form, let them know how long it will take for someone to get back to them
• If they make a booking, let them know if this can be considered confirmed or not, and advise what communication they should expect from you next and when
• If they made a purchase, send them an email when it has been confirmed, despatched, if there have been delays, etc.
• If they sign up for your newsletter, tell them when to expect the next issue

An informed customer is a happy customer!

Knowing how your website visitors arrived at your website helps you hone your marketing efforts and focus your advertising spend.

Even if you do not spend money on advertising, understanding who or what refers you business empowers you to nurture particular relationships and explore similar opportunities.

To help you better track your website referrers, you can:

• Ask for visitors to tell you where they found you as part of your enquiry, booking or sales form
• Run reports in your website statistics software to see which websites refer traffic (and turn into sales, if the software supports it)
• Ask your web developer to write a script that allows you to track online and offline advertising campaigns by assigning promotional codes to the website addresses used in the advertising
• As part of your post-sales procedure, ask new customers to recall where they first heard about you, and dig beyond just “I found your website”

Make a point of understanding what third-party software, if any, is running on your website. Where a perfectly suitable tool already exists, a web developer will rarely reinvent the wheel. Shopping carts, blogs and discussion forums are examples of common requests that a web developer might choose to implement using existing open source or commercial software.

But popular software is also targeted by hackers, so needs to be monitored more closely and kept up-to-date with security patches.

Ensure it is somebody’s responsibility to know what software is installed on your website and when it needs to be upgraded.

When writing content for your website, consider what your visitor might be interested in doing next, and consider what you want them to do. Find a happy middle ground, and link to that place.

This is a call-to-action, and most business websites forget to include them.

Examples include “learn more about how we can reduce costs in your business”, “email us for a free consultation” and “comment on this suggestion now“.