Understanding the audience, what they expect from the website
Having a website can really help your business but only if it provides what the audience are looking for. This means that you are going to have to have a way to determine what they are looking for. Luckily this is a lot easier to do than it sounds. One of the great things about the internet is that it gives you lots of information that you can use to get to know what your visitors want from your site.
The reason that you have to make sure that you understand your audience and make sure that you know what they are looking for when they visit your site is that if you don't you will find that you have very few visitors. Actually what you will find is that they don't stay on your site, they will go someplace else where they can find what they are looking for. Most web designers focus almost exclusively on getting people to their site. This is really only half of the battle, you also need them to stay on your site so that you can get them to do whatever you are trying to achieve with your site. This requires that you know what your audience is looking for.
The obvious question is just how do you know what your visitors are looking for when they come to your site? There are several ways that you can find out, the easiest is to simply ask them. Almost all well designed sites these days are interactive, this can include poll questions, a comments page or even a forum. This gives you an excellent opportunity to find out what your visitors have to say. Just make sure that you pay attention and adjust your site accordingly.
The other way that you can find out what your visitors are looking for is to really study your analytics. You can get all kinds of statistics about the people who visit your site and if you really pay attention to them they can help you make sure that you are providing what they are looking for. You are going to want to pay attention to how long people stay on your site, what pages get visited most often, which never get visited. You will also really want to focus on which links your visitors click, where they go after your site can tell you a lot about what they were looking for.
One other great source of information that you can use to find out what you visitors are looking for is the keywords that they used to find your site. If they found your site using a search engine your stats should tell you what term they searched for to find it. This will tell you exactly what they were looking for and should give you a good idea of what you should have on your site.