Ever find yourself answering the same email over (and over?)

Your reply is an ideal candidate for your website’s Frequently Asked Questions page. After a year, you will have developed an impressive suite of answers, and your visitors will appreciate the information you have provided them with. Be sure to add calls-to-actions to your FAQ pages so that you don’t entirely lose the benefit of that person contacting you.

Your FAQ will also become part of your training kit for new employees to become up-to-speed in your business.

When designing your website, or sitting down with a web design company to plan the look-and-feel, be careful how you style the content on your website. Consider:

• White text on a dark background is hard to read for an extended period. Prefer dark text on a light background.
• Small text can be difficult for some people to read, particularly on screens with high resolutions. Prefer a happy medium. Look at other websites that appeal to your target demographic for guidance.
• Large blocks of text can appear daunting. Break it up into smaller chunks, use bullet lists, and add imagery.
• Fancy fonts can look different from one computer to the next. Sans-serif fonts tend to work better on a screen (and serif fonts for print.)

Ask colleagues for first-impression thoughts on the readability of your text, and adjust the style according to their feedback.

It can be difficult generating a buzz for a business website, but without other websites actively linking to yours, it can be a slow road to achieving the traffic and search engine rankings that come from a strong internet profile.

You can encourage this by adding unique, fresh, relevant, timely and informative content to your website. Depending on the nature of your business, you could achieve this through regular articles, blog posts, photo galleries, whitepapers, knowledge bases or user-generated opinion.

Through useful content comes respect as an industry leader, and people like to quote leaders.

Tracking your business referrals is not something you can decide to do later. By the time you want to use the information, you need to have at least a year of historical data behind you.

Consider asking your visitors to tell you how they found you when they fill out an enquiry or order form on your website. Even though your sales procedures might include asking for this information, it can be helpful to know the same from those who did not end up purchasing from you.

Never put a barrier between your business and your customer.

When you accept orders through your website, provide as many payment options as is practical for the way you run your business. If you accept credit cards, also consider allowing your customer to call through their credit card details. Don’t forget bank transfers (direct deposits,) which save your merchant fee costs. And, depending on your target market, you might explore PayPal, or consider accepting cheques or money orders.

And, no, there is no risk in displaying your bank account details (BSB and account number) during an order process — the worst someone can do is put money into your account!