Internet attention spans are very short. You have just five seconds to get across your message. Don’t waste this precious time telling them you are professional – tell them about what you have to offer. If you make drains, tell them that – don’t say you provide ‘plumbing solutions’.

For a business: Define what your business does

For an organisation: Explain your mission

For an individual: Explain who you are

All visitors need to be able to get where they need to go directly from the home page By defining your visitors you will design the site so that they can.

You might have two kinds of visitors; those who found you by searching and those who already know who you are and are visiting for some other purpose. You might subdivide this second category into existing and prospective customers/members/clients.

You probably have a lot to say but don’t overwhelm your visitors. Give them things they will find useful, keep it easy to understand.

Give the surfers a quick over view. Remember that they could be competition! Give prospective customers/members/clients a reason to do business with you. Give existing customers/members/clients a login area.

Your visitors will give you a lot of information if they get something useful in return.

You would like to find out more about the visitors to your site, who they are and what kinds of things they want to know:

A questions and answers page will allow you to see what questions come up.

A well designed ‘how to’ wizard will allow you to find out what their needs are.

If you can offer them something that persuades them to register at your site you can stay in touch with them. Google Analytics and similar software can tell you many things about your visitors, such as where they came from and how long they spent on your site.

An example of a transaction might be a booking or a purchase. It could also be a registration process or a record of specific information.

Think about all the things that you do with your customers/members/clients that are repeated again and again. You can automate all these processes – enquiries, pricing, selection, registration, signups, payments, the list goes on and on. Then you will be able to use this information in new ways to help your business – for example by allowing people to log in to see what they or others have done.