Nowadays, a website is a vital tool for an enterprise or organisation to promote itself. But for non-experts, what are the secrets to commissioning and maintaining a website that will do its job, rather than become an embarrassing white elephant? Michael Wignall of StreamEngine Ltd offers some golden rules...

A lot of our work involves performing surgery to improve failing websites. Hopefully these rules and tips will help you to avoid becoming that kind of a client.

1 – The Golden Rule
Websites, blogs and email are marketing tools. If you were building a house, you’d get an architect or master builder to work before hiring the decorators. Talk to a digital marketer before the designers get started rather than afterwards. You’ll save a lot of time and money.

2 - Budget for time as well as money
Look to find at least 2 days per month to run the site and your online marketing - it will make a huge difference to the results. Spend 50% of your money on the design and build, and the rest on copywriting, optimisation and other marketing. Budget to replace your site every 4 years.

3 – Keep the visual design simple
Spend no more than 10% of your money on design. Your website is your public face, so you want something unique and beautiful. Typically it’s the one thing everyone feels qualified to express an opinion about. Before you know it you’ve spent half your budget on the curtains, and made the site harder to build.
A bad look will hurt you, but a great one won’t help that much. The visual design gives a quick impression of whether your website is to be trusted, and should fit with your overall ‘brand’. If in doubt keep it standard and generic.

4 – Think Optimisation
Or in plain English how to get people to your site. The initial optimisation of a site is a specialist task, worth paying for. Marketing a site from scratch is very tough these days. A good SEO (search engine optimisation) will set up your site to be attractive to search engines and tell you what to do to keep it that way.
Pay particular attention to updating content and links. Update your site regularly - a static site will disappear from searches. If you have information to share, write a regular blog, submit it to aggregation sites and respond to comments. Encourage social bookmarks. Give people a reason to link to you.

5 – And Usability
Or how to help site visitors perform an action like making a purchase or getting in contact. The keys here are navigation and the written word. Good navigation will stop users leaving, and take them to their goal. Bring the information to the user so they don’t have to remember where they’ve been.
We read websites differently to print, so if possible rewrite all of your copy. Keep this to about half the length of print copy and make liberal use of headlines and bullet points to make it scan easily. Hire a copywriter for your key pages - Home, About, Contact, and any Sales pages. Include customer recommendations on the latter.

6 - Be Social
Choose a couple of marketing methods and spend a minimum one day a month on them. Most social enterprises have a core customer base which will give you a hand. There are plenty of options from regular email contact, site forums, your blog, or external sites like Facebook. Whatever you do, make it regular. Comment on other people’s blogs.

7 – Learn and Improve
Monitor your site and your marketing using the free Google Analytics system. Spend a couple of hours a month on it. Concentrate your time on what’s working and fix or drop what isn’t. Get a specialist in after the first few months to appraise how it’s going.

Michael Wignall is director of StreamEngine Ltd, a digital marketing and copywriting agency specialising in green, ethical and social businesses. Their website is www.streamengine.co.uk