by Craig Burr

Created on: December 16, 2010   Last Updated: December 22, 2010

Planning is what makes the difference to a website being a success, or it being a failure. Every successful website includes a couple of factors, or even all of those we are going to cover later in the article. One thing that every website MUST include is a privacy policy. This will let your visitors know how their personal information is going to be used. Without the privacy policy there is no trust between you and your visitors.

♦ Contacts

Every website must include a page for any relevant contact information. If you don't want to include a phone number, then the page should at least include an email address for your visitors to contact you. Nobody will feel comfortable with a company in which they can not contact when needed. A contact form is good for this and you'll see these in use on many websites on the internet.

♦ Search

Search boxes are key for any big websites. These will usually be placed at the top of web pages to easily allow visitors to find what exactly what they are looking for. Some websites also use sitemaps for the same reason. There is no need for these things on small websites; however, as your site grows then these really do need to be included.

♦ Analytics

The point of analytics is to watch the statistics of your website. How many visitors you are getting daily and what they are looking at lets you know exactly what you need more of. If visitors are only reading certain subjects and not others, then straight away, you know to write more content covering that subject. If your hosting company does not provide a tool to watch your statistics then Google has a great free tool called Google Analytics.

♦ Newsletters

Newsletters are a great way of keeping in touch with your website visitors. The good thing is, is that when they receive a newsletter then the chances are is that they will return back to your website time and time again. As each new person signs up then you are building your list of potential customers.

♦ SEO content

In order for people to visit your website, people need to be able to find you. The best way of doing this is to optimise your website and content search engine. Keywords need to be placed in the titles of your web pages as well as the content. Take a look at each page of your website and then optimise it accordingly for search engines.

This is just a short list of some of the most common qualities of the successful websites. Try to include these as well as finding other things that those same sites are doing and trying to find a way to incorporate those into your website.  

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