IS YOUR WEBSITE WORKING HARD ENOUGH?

Rather like an employee review, pose these questions to assess your website's potential as part of a winning team:

Does your website communicate clearly?
Visitors need to find key information without too much searching. Consider design, layout and content to make proper use of your online presence; not forgetting your mobile visitors. Make contact details and CTA (call to action) buttons prominent, to help convert your visitors into leads.

Is your website working efficiently?
Visitors won't hang around if your site takes a long time to load. Making adjustments to the coding, images, layout and the running order of scripts can make your website work far more efficiently. Also, make sure you are investing in professional web hosting to support such an important part of your business.

Is your website customer focused?
Reviewing your website traffic and visitors' behaviour patterns will give you vital clues to how well your website is performing; what's proving most effective and what needs attention. Analytics tools can help gauge the success of a promotion, monitor which pages are most popular and which areas are being overlooked.

Do you need to expand your website's skills?
Keep an eye on your competitors and try to keep one step ahead by introducing new features that increase interaction with your website visitors. This could be by using video clips to demonstrate a product, adding event booking to save you admin time or including an area for secure document access, whether by clients or sales teams.

Does your website comply with the law? 
The Disability Discrimination Act made sure websites were accessible to all. Since then, accessibility has become a fundamental of website design, improving user experience for everyone. The EU e-Privacy Directive is one of a list of legal requirements for your website and email database. Make sure you comply with the law.

You may already update your website by posting news, offers and tweaking pages, but there is good reason to include a broader appraisal. For a little time invested, your website can make an even bigger contribution to your business.