With the rise of social media, user-generated content, and widgets, there are more factors than ever to consider when designing a company website. Throw in design aesthetics, branding and SEO and it all gets very confusing, very quickly. Here are a few of the things to consider when you’re trying to maximize website effectiveness. 

Business considerations

A website is effective if it contributes to business results based on the specific goals of the business. In order to be effective it needs to attract the users or traffic whose actions will correlate to specific business goals. In the case of new-customer revenue goals, for example, the design needs to support connecting to your target market segments with search engines, through search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a broad term that refers to a set of techniques and guidelines that are constantly changing. These guidelines start with making sure that search engines can crawl and index your site pages. They also include structuring copy, tags, and links so that the search engine conclude that your site pages are focused on particular theme and provide a searcher a good place to land. The search engines reward strong optimization with a higher ranking in the natural results page, which then drives more qualified traffic to your site.

Engaging qualified traffic

A website cannot be effective...if it does not engage qualified traffic in the actions that correlate to business outcomes. Engagement increases when a site is designed for the visitor's needs—not, as some might believe, as a product sales pitch.

A website should behave like a great consultative sales call, providing self-segmentation options for the user on the homepage. The home page should address what each visitor is most focused on, their place in the buying cycle, their role in the decision process, their pain point, or the issue they are trying to resolve.

When successful, this type of web design allows visitors to quickly get to the most relevant content and feel as if they have found a place to get their mission accomplished.

Ideally, the site should also provide multiple places for interaction. Relegating all interaction to a simple "contact us" page is usually a mistake.

Meeting visitors' expectations

One KPI (key performance indicator) that is relevant for measuring how well you are meeting visitors’ expectations is the number of returning visitors vs new visitors. A high number of returning visitors is a clear sign that you have given visitors good reasons to return.

Another way a company can tell if a website is meeting expectations is to just ask them. There are several intercept survey solutions available in the market that are great, and it is amazing how few companies deploy such a straightforward mechanism to ask visitors how their visit went.

Typically there are also key information-exchange offers built into the site, where the visitor is asked for a small amount of information in return for a whitepaper, case study, etc. Rising conversion rates on these activities signal that the site is accomplishing the goal of moving visitors to the next phase of the relationship.

Making use of widgets

Widgets are interfaces to web services or tools that can be distributed to locations on the web where users and target prospects congregate (i.e., not at your site) to engage them where they are. They also usually are added to a desktop as a consistent interface point to the service.

Every business has a possible tool or set of information and a configuration of that data that should be valuable to its customers and prospects—putting it into this format (multiple dev formats available at Yahoo and Google) and then making it widely available is a good way to leverage a network of desktop users on the internet.

Possible widgets could be a simple Q&A, some type of calculator, a product finder, or a modeling tool. Each of these valuable widgets will either eventually bring users to your site to obtain more value or allow you to convert users where they are.

Adding user-generated content

Product reviews by customers are great if the site has a focus on distributing products or providing product comparisons. User-generated content can also be valuable in highly technical situations, where the user population has more real-life application experience than the manufacturer and can therefore provide significant information about an application more effectively.

Converting website visitors into leads

The best way to convert website visitors into leads is to embrace the entire buying cycle. To do this, you need to be more relevant up front in the design, whether it be a site or a landing page. Make each contact more customer-centric rather than product-centric. Then be guided by real data — both behavioral (Web analytics) and attitudinal (surveys, usability, testing) on which offers and content convert more effectively.