How can you know if your web site is a good website? Or for that matter, what the heck is a good website anyway?

A good website is a good website if it accomplishes the goals set forth by you and your company. If you have built your website to sell products, for example, you can say that your website is a good website if it sells products. But is that REALLY it?? You need to consider a few things before you can go buy that new Ferrari 430 Scuderia (very cool car I might say).

• Are you selling as many products as a good website sells, or you are only selling a few products now and then?
• Are your sales pages good enough to consider your website a good website?
• Do you have enough visitors to your website to consider it a good website?
• Do you have enough return traffic or all your visitors are first time visitors?
• Do your visitors stay on the site long enough time to consider your website a good website?

Ask yourself the following questions to know if your website is a good one:

• Who cares?
• What are you looking for?
• What kind of visitors do you have?
• Which is your priority?
• How should you measure your success?

Who Cares?

If the website belongs to a larger company, it usually doesn’t belong to a single person, so there´s not just one person who can say if you have a good website. You may have to round up the people who are vitally interested interested in the websites success. CAUTION! Make sure you keep you website mastermind group as small as possible. If you want to see a cat fight breakout, get a room full interested, un-knowledgeable “web masters” fighting over what is important to your website (although, it is fun to watch!).

You will find the techno-geeks, the sales people, the public relations people, etc. etc. and every one of them will have their own idea of what is a good website. This is why determining the goal and what the end success of the website should be before arguing that the top banner should be purple vs violet.

What are you lookng for?

Every one of the people who cares about the website will have their own idea of what they want out of a good website. Many of them will just be talking on behalf of their own departments, but you must force them to think on behalf of the company. The look of the site, in many cases, tends to get a lot more attention than conversion in many companies. Remember, if you have no visitors to the site, or worse yet, you can’t convert visitors to buyers, who cares what the site looks like???

Every department can have its own objectives, goals and aspirations- everyone has his own idea about what is a good website- but the true need is to think as a company and, ultimately, of supporting the end goal.

What kind of visitors do you have?

Every website has first time visitors, returning visitors, curious visitors, buyers, people that arrived by mistake, people that spend a short time at the website, people that spend a long time at the website, etc.

What kind of visitors do you want – those who show up more often, those who read the most pages, buy more stuff, buy more frequently or spend the most money?

Which are the most important visitors for your company?

Once you have that all figured out, you just might be on your way to a good website!

What is your priority?

Once you understand what everybody needs, not wants, you will have to prioritize everybody´s goals.

Will you go after increasing visits, selling more products per visit, providing more information about the company and its products, improving customer satisfaction?

Every line of code, graphic, button, banner, no matter what department requests it, needs to fall in line with the ultimate goal of the site. If it doesn’t, scrap it.

How should you measure your success?

How can you be sure that the numbers that you are getting are telling you that your site is a good website? It depends…

• If your main priority is to get visitors, then www.Alexa.com and its ranking can help you on that, but using Google Analytics will give you most of the data you will need.
• If your main goal is revenue, then the sales will have the leading voice.
• If you are going after customer satisfaction then the team must agree how will you gather satisfaction data and how will you weigh it.

All the information that you gather must help you make your business decisions. It´s not a matter of getting as much information as you can, because too much information can be as bad as not enough information. Don’t over- analyze! Analyze, find a solution then take action!

Make sure that you keep measuring your success, make it part of a constant improvement process, because the web changes month after month.

Then you´ll really be able to tell if your website is a good website. THEN go get your Ferrari 430 Scuderia! Rock on!