Spend 5 minutes randomly surfing the net and you will find dozens of fantastic looking websites. But how many of these are great websites? I’ll lay odds that many of them are useless.

Why?

Because it takes more than a fantastic design to make a great website. Let’s look at what it does take.

Ingredients of a successful website

The first thing is that you need a strategy. What’s the business? What are you trying to achieve? How are you going to do that? What do you need to do in order to achieve it?

These are the questions you need to be answering before you even start to think about the website.

Now that you’ve got your strategy in place you can think about the components of the website. In order to be successful 3 key components need to be in place.

• Design. You must have a world class design. Classy, relevant to the business and in keeping with the latest trends in site designs. No fluff, no gimmicks and, especially, no background music.
• Content. Without great content your world class designed site is just eye candy. You want content relevant to you business. Content in the form of articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos and it all needs to be updated frequently. Static websites or online brochures will get you nowhere these days.
• Marketing. You need a plan for promoting the site. This is going to be a combination of many things such as search engine optimization, email marketing, social media marketing, blogging.

Without any one of these critical components your website is useless. So answer the question to yourself. Is your website useless? If the answer is yes then it’s time to do something about it.