How to make your website awesome

Example 1:

Samantha owns an insurance broking firm specialising in servicing SMEs.
It will be hard to make her corporate website unique.
But she could create (and promote) the best SME insurance blog in Australia.

Samantha’s larger corporate competitors are a little apprehensive about blogs and social media. Samantha is an SME specialist and insurance expert. She has the opportunity to carve out a niche online that is more useful and valuable than a standard corporate website. Her blog would demonstrate (rather than simply talk about) her expertise.

Example 2:

Paul owns a local high-end grocery store.
How can he compete with the websites of the billion dollar supermarket chains he competes with? How can he build something unique online?
Paul could create an online community notice board, where customers can discuss what’s happening in their neighborhood.
Paul could do this for very low cost using a service like Ning.com.
Paul could promote the notice board in store to build awareness.

Paul’s strategy is to do what he does offline, to compete with the majors: keeping it local, and building personal relationships.

Example 3:

Jane owns a small chain of bookstores.
It’s going to be difficult to differentiate from the websites of the big online bookstores and bricks and mortar chains.
Instead: Jane could film interviews with local authors that she promotes in her stores, and upload them to her YouTube channel.

Instead of competing head on, Jane could use the social power of YouTube to build her brand online through unique, distributed content. Jane prides herself on finding unique books and supporting local authors. By uploading video content she can remain true to her point of difference, by building great relationships with authors and customers.

Turning awesomeness into success

Of course, some awesome things that you do online will directly help you achieve your business goals, and others will not. Therefore it’s worth applying a third filter to the possible list of things you might do online. This is the business objective filter, and it ensures that what you end up with is awesome for users while also helping your business achieve its objectives.

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The Value Filter

The web is full of irrelevant content and clutter. The content and functionality that you leave off your website could benefit the awesomeness of your website more than what you include.

You can follow a simple process to develop ideas for website content and functionality and help you decide what to leave off. We call it the “Value Filter”.

Fill in the table below. Start with users and outline what they hope to achieve from a visit to your website.

Next add what you hope to achieve from a visit to your website from these users.

Lastly: the creative part. Add relevant and unique content and functionality ideas. But use the information in the table to filter out any ideas that do not address both the broad needs of users and achieve your business goals. You may find that the lengthy biographies and high-resolution photos of your management team on the ‘About Us’ page really aren’t helping achieve anyone’s needs. The Value Filter will provide you with good ammunition to argue for leaving it off your website.

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To summarise

Be relevant

Gain customer insight from research.
Understand what they want/need.
Get rid of anything that isn’t relevant to them.

Be unique

Develop a unique proposition you can own.
Be the best at something.

Be successful

Define online objectives based upon business objectives.
Define how you will measure success and measure your progress regularly.
Don’t spend your whole budget before launch. Use 50% of your budget to build the website, save the rest for optimisation and further iterations over the first year.

David Trewern founded DTDigital in 1996, and quickly established himself as a pioneer of digital marketing and website design and development. DTDigital has since grown to become Melbourne’s largest full service agency connected digital team.