I’m going to make a very bold statement. Most business websites are miserable failures.

They may look nice, have cool web 2.0 features and even tons of traffic, but a business website really has only one purpose; to make money. Each one may take a different approach, for example, you could sell products directly, promote affiliate offers or even generate leads, but at the end of the day, the goal is to convert your visitors into paying customers.

Most websites fail to do that.

There are lots of reasons, but here are the three most common, and what you can do to change them.

1. Your copy sucks. You may be one of the top experts in your industry, but that doesn’t mean you can write compelling copy that makes people understand what you do or makes them want to buy right now. That job is best left to a copywriter…a real one, not someone you found up on Craig’s List. My recommendation is Phenomenal Content LLC, which offers, as you might guess, phenomenal copywriting and editing services at a great value.
2. There is no call to action. When a visitors arrives on your website, you want them to do something specific. Maybe it’s to buy a product, maybe it’s to sign up for your newsletter or maybe it’s to call you. Tell them. Don’t expect them to be mind readers, and don’t be afraid that you might come off as pushy. Your job is to help people, and you can’t do that if they aren’t your customer.
3. You don’t make it easy. Sure, you know your way around your own website, but do your visitors have to dig for contact information? Do they find your website difficult to navigate or is your checkout process a nightmare? You can get a pretty good idea of what challenges people have on your site by the questions they ask.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. Improving your website is an ongoing process that is never finished—there is always something that can be better. If you want a solid step by step checklist to get more traffic, conversions and revenue from your website, I recommend getting a copy of our 21 page website checklist!

These days, web design pricing tends to be all over the map. You can find a lot of web designers who claim to be willing to design a website for $200, a lot who wouldn’t touch a project for less than $10,000 and even more who fall somewhere in between. So what’s the right price? You’re going to hate this answer, but there isn’t one right price. It’s sort of like buying a home; it depends on a lot of different variables.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

You could save tons of money by going with a dirt-cheap web designer, but if your website does a poor job of converting your visitors into customers, what did you really save? On the other hand, if you blow your entire marketing budget on the perfect website and then can’t afford to market it, did you really make a wise investment?

You need a website that presents a professional image and gives your visitors that warm fuzzy feeling deep in their gut that lets them know they can trust you. But more importantly, you need a website that converts your visitors into customers. It’s all about results.

To determine whether the price/value ratio is on the mark, you’ll have to know what your website needs to be capable of. Functionality impacts price. For example, our website design prices currently start at $1,225. That’s for a completely custom designed, multi-page website website, coded with valid HTML and CSS that works properly in all major browsers. Specialized functionality, like a content management system, which gives you the ability to easily  change your own website content, moves your investment up into the $2,200 range. The more bells and whistles you add, the more your website will cost.

Some people may be thinking that’s a lot of money, which is both right and wrong at the same time. If you just want to set up a blog as a hobby, a couple thousand dollars is probably a lot of money to spend, but if you want to set up a custom website for your company, investing a couple thousand dollars is virtually nothing. Think about it like this. You’re selling a product or service, and if you’re website allows you to increase your sales by even just 5%, how quickly will your investment pay for itself? More importantly, what will it mean to your bottom line after that?

What is the scope of your project

In addition to the functionality of your website, the scope of your project can have a significant impact on the price. More work obviously means more fees, so you’ll need to factor in certain details ahead of time, such as:

• How many pages will be included?
• Will you be providing content or will they write it for you?
• Who will input your content (copy and/or products)
• Is web hosting included?
• Is a domain name included?
• Will you be providing images/photos?

When do you need it?

You might be surprised at how many people wait until the last minute to start their web design project. If you want to save some money, don’t be that guy! When a firm has to rearrange their existing projects, work extended hours, through weekends or holidays to meet your deadline, there will be additional fees.

Experience counts

OJ Simpson can tell you how important it is to hire the right lawyer, and the same principal applies to web designers. An experienced web design firm will almost always charge more, but will produce much better results. We’re not just talking about appearance though. In this case, we’re talking about your bottom line. An experienced firm knows what it takes to get your new website up and running quickly, how to drive traffic to it and how to convert your visitors into customers.

Experienced web design firms will often utilize standardized processes, like our web design process, and checklists, like our web design checklist to make sure each client receives consistent quality, their specific needs are met and that no details are missed. If you’re considering several firms, look at the systems they’ve put in place, some of the websites they’ve designed, read their testimonials and even contact some of their clients. If they seem to have solid systems, you like the style of their work, and their clients are successful and happy with their service, it may be worth the additional cost to hire a more experienced firm.

The bottom line?

Price should never be your sole determining factor, in fact, it should be the last and least significant factor in your decision. You should choose a web design firm with sufficient experience to execute your project, but you also need to make sure you can afford to market your new website once it’s up and running. The “build it and they will come” days are far behind us.

No matter how well you maintain your website, eventually, you’re going to have broken links. You might have moved a page, put a typo in a link or maybe someone else linked to a page on your website that no longer (or never did) exist. The end result is a visitor or search engine arriving at a page that doesn’t exist.

Finding broken links within your website is simple and painless; you can either use W3C’s online link checker tool, or a more robust tool, like Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which is free and runs from your desktop. Finding broken links from other websites is equally simple, but takes a bit more work to fix them. First, you’ll have to dig through your server logs to find any 404 errors, then see which sites are linking to those non-existent pages and contact the site owners to have them corrected. If you can’t get in touch with the site owner, or he isn’t willing to correct the link, you’ll need to set up a 301 redirect to automatically send visitors and search engines to the correct page.

This is so important because if a visitors arrives at a non-existent page, they will usually just leave and visit one of your competitors instead. If a search engine finds several non-existent pages on your website, they may lower your ranking, which means less traffic.

Far too often, a website redesign starts off focused on appearance instead of measurable goals. If appearance is your first priority, you’re on the fast-track to failure, so before you jump into the fun stuff, grab a pad and a pen and spend some time figuring out the answers to these 4 questions:

1. What are your goals? Before you change a single line of code, before you even start thinking about what your new website will look like, you need to know exactly what you want it to accomplish. Do you want your new website to present a particular image? Do you want it to generate more leads/sales or do a better job of converting the traffic you’re already getting? Figure this out and you’ll get a lot more from your new website, plus, the entire process will move more smoothly and quickly.
2. What is and isn’t working? You need to know how your current website impacts your goals. This means spending some time analyzing your website traffic, leads and sales. You’ll probably notice that a small handful of sources drive most of your traffic, leads and sales, but a little more digging will often turn up some low-hanging fruit that you’re missing out on. Maybe you’ll realize that 70% of your revenue comes from one or two products, which would be an indication that you should focus on developing more similar products. Or perhaps you have a #1 ranking for a particular keyword but don’t rank at all for a few other variations that may drive reasonable traffic with lower competition. The more you dig, the more opportunities you’ll find.
3. What are you up against? Potential customers will be looking at your competitors, so you need to as well. The idea isn’t to copy, or even emulate them. The idea is to make sure that your website covers the same bases they do while filling in the gaps they’ve missed. For example, if all of your competitors offer online ordering, you damn sure better offer it too, but also offer what they don’t. Perhaps you sell a complex product that people often call you about before ordering online. You could launch a blog or forum that lets your visitors learn more about it. This helps present you as an industry leader and will often help to shorten your sales process too.
4. Where are you now? Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was Apple, Starbucks or any other large, successful company. Take a cold and emotionless look at where you stand today; traffic, exposure, brand recognition, budget, etc. If you’re running a small mom-and-pop store with little website traffic, spending thousands of dollars to add the newest web 2.0 social-media this and that to your website is a really bad idea. You need to invest for the future, but rather than adding features, focus on driving traffic and building a brand. Before you add any special functionality, you should determine how it’s going to help you reach your goals.

As if you didn’t already have enough technical terms to deal with, now everyone is talking about CSS and you may find yourself wondering what it is, why it matters, and more importantly, what it can do for you.

CSS, otherwise known as Cascading Style Sheets, is simply a way to tell a web browser how to display the elements on an HTML page. It offers more precise control and is supported by all browsers today.

Ideally, your CSS should be contained in a separate file, which is then linked to within the and head tags of each web page, as such:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='/style.css' type='text/css' media='all' />

The first, and most significant advantage in using CSS this way is that it puts all of your formatting into a single file. This means that rather than editing each individual page, you only have to change one file, which can save you a lot of time and effort when you make changes. For example, instead of using cumbersome tables to control your layout, you can use CSS to position and style elements, and the best part is that if you’ve set it up properly from the beginning, you can change your entire design by just modifying your CSS file. A great example of this is CSS Zen Garden. In each example, the HTML remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external CSS file; it allows complete control over the appearance of an HTML document. The learning curve can be steep, but once you have a solid understanding, you can create more compelling designs in far less time than ever before.

CSS can help improve your search engine optimization (though just slightly) by reducing the ratio of code to text, which makes your content more relevant in the eyes of the search engines, resulting in more traffic. Less code also means a faster load loading page; another factor in how a web page ranks, but also a factor in your page view numbers because people will usually spend more time on a faster website.

By now, it’s probably obvious that you need a solid understanding of CSS. To get started, you can find tutorials on every aspect of CSS at W3Schools.com and for more advanced learning and interaction with experts on the subject, you’ll want to bookmark CSS Tricks, by Chris Coyier. That information along with a few books and healthy dose of trial and error will take you a long way to becoming a CSS pro!