5 things you should know for a successful website

1. You are the secret to a successful website
   As web designers, we can ultimately only point our clients in the right direction. It is your decisions that shape and define your website's future. Your role is of great importance. Hiring a web designer and walking away after it's launched is the wrong move.
   
2. You have a diverse and challenging role
   Your role as a client is a complex and challenging one in the creation and maintenance of your website. You must be able to visualize the long-term direction of your site. Your site should be promoted internally and externally. Your employees should be excited and interested in every aspect of your site. Your content should be relevant and of high quality. No one knows your company more than you do.
   
3. You identify problems, we provide solutions
   One of the biggest problems in most web projects is when our client starts making decisions that are best left to the web designer. The most common occurs at the design stage. Sometimes a client suggests things like ‘make the logo bigger'. This is their solution to the problem of prominence of their branding. If they had expressed the problem instead of the solution, it would enable us to suggest a better design approach. Instead of just making the logo bigger, it may be better to simply add more whitespace or change its position.
   
   Maybe a client's problem is a failure to produce leads, therefore they suggest adding a form on their site which visitors are required to fill out. There are numerous ways to engage your customers without annoying them, but unless you express the problem, we may never have the chance to suggest a better solution. Our role as marketers and web designers is to keep you informed about the latest technologies and lead you in the right direction. It also takes an outsider to help you define your customers' needs.
   
4. Your site should always be evolving.
   Just like a new car, once you drive it off the lot, its value starts to dwindle. After a website's initial launch, it is also left to slowly decay. The content becomes out of date, the design begins to look old-fashioned and the technology becomes obsolete. This inevitably leads to the site being replaced by a new version, and the cycle repeats itself.
   
   As our client, we encourage you to invest regularly in your website. You should have one person who maintains an ongoing relationship with our marketers and designers. Together we can keep the content fresh, improve the user interface and ensure that the technology keeps pace with change. Ultimately this is more cost effective than replacing the site every few years.
   
5. Don't underestimate the power of content.
   You probably already know -- content is extremely important in getting your site ranked high on search engine results. Yet many of our clients are unwilling or unable to spend money ensuring its quality. Writing copy is not an easy task and can be extremely time-consuming. Often, it's left as an afterthought -- copied and pasted from a company brochure -- which is usually not good enough for readers or search engines. Sometimes hiring a copywriter is the best solution to ensure that the copy is well-styled and helps with your site's SEO. Writing for the web is very different from writing for print and can present some unique challenges.