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As well over 90% of people now turn to the Internet as their primary information source, it’s crucial to your bottom line to ensure that your Web presence is as effective as possible.

Yet 95% of the more than 5,000 Websites that I’ve reviewed since 1995 were leaving money on the table, sometimes a lot of it - and often in ways that could be easily avoided or rectified.

Many of these issues are caused by one of more of these factors: 

• Lack of strategic planning and consideration of the full range of visitor types to the site, their needs, and likely emotional responses.
• Lack of clear positioning and navigation elements that drive visitors around the site to ensure that they see relevant content.
• Lack of cohesion between the Website and the organization’s social media presence.
• Lack of coordination between departments to maximize leverage of content and calls to action - sometimes this is inadvertent, but sometimes it is deliberate.
• Lack of sufficiently senior and informed management oversight to ensure that appropriate strategies and systems are in place and acted upon.

All of these can cause significant loss of potential revenue, since the failure to engage visitors with your Web presence reduces conversion and referral rates.

This article briefly explores the above issues, showing how they manifest, their impact, and how they can be detected and resolved.

Lack of thinking about visitor types

A common mistake in strategic Web design is to create a site based on a homogenous view of the typical visitor. This assumes that all visitors will think in the same way, will use the same vocabulary, and will follow similar paths through the site.

Of course, this is far from the truth. Visitors will have a wide range of needs, levels of literacy and language skills, decision-making processes, and will respond differently to various types of calls to action. It is very important to consider this for your particular demographic, so that you can create copy and navigational structures that appeal as widely as possible, and to avoid losing visitors and revenue-generating opportunities.

One of the most valuable exercises that you can undertake is to define a set of typical visitor "personas". Think about all of the different types of individual that you might attract to your Web presence, not just current and prospective customers. These can include potential investors or partners, bankers, insurers, job seekers, media, and even members of the public who may find your site by chance but who are interested in your content.

In creating these "personas", consider these characteristics:

• Gender / age / language(s) spoken
• Education level / income
• Their reason for visiting the site - be very specific
• How do they make decisions - are they visual / emotional / data-driven? 
• Content / elements that are likely to attract them to respond
• Content / elements that are likely to deter them from interacting with you further
• Any other relevant details?
• Give them each a name!

It's best to do this with input from a wide range of both senior and junior staff, and from all departments and levels of interaction with the public so that you can build as complete and varied a picture as possible.