Why Do You Have a Website?

That may sound like a strange question in this day and age – what small business wouldn’t want a website? But the fact that we take websites as a given is even more reason to ask the question. You need to have a clear purpose or, rather, purposes for your website, and none of them should involve simply fulfilling the expectations of others.

Nor should the answer to the question be: to promote my business.

That’s too vague and won’t help you focus your content, your online and offline marketing efforts, or your plans for the website’s future. There should be many purposes for your site and those purposes can change over time, but they need to be specific.

I’ve seen single page websites that simply provide a phone number and a map to a store. There are two purposes to that page: provide contact information and provide directions. And it fulfilled two of my needs that day, so I’d call that page a success. Had they put their hours on there it would have fulfilled another of my needs and it would have served the purpose of saving them time answering the phone. The point is that even a single page can have several purposes and having purposes allows us to measure success, judge the quality of the page in terms of fulfilling purposes, and much more.

While there might be purposes that apply to your site as a whole, you want to look at each individual page and ask its purposes. Because purposes can sometimes be difficult to ascertain or put into words, here are a few more to get you started:

• Convince visitors of your reputation
• Provide visitors with help they can apply themselves
• Provide visitors with reasons why they need your help
• Amuse your visitors
• Demonstrate why your business is different from competitors
• Help visitors understand trends in your industry
• Allow visitors to order from their smartphone
• Pre-qualify visitors before they get in touch with you
• Provide visitors with additional reading material they can download

And you need to keep re-evaluating the purposes of your site and its pages. For a lot of us, it’s not even a matter of re-evaluating: we’ve never asked the question explicitly before.

Start now.