Sometime in the short history of the internet, a fallacy akin to the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” has captured the minds of would-be entrepreneurs looking to find fortune online. I’m not sure how this all began, perhaps deep-rooted in Bill Gates’s website-building Front Page software, with its promise that anyone can make a website and get online to show off their prized purebred bulldog or their newborn octuplets. Yes, it’s true! Anyone can cobble together a web page for the world to see, but is it presentable to anyone beyond close friends and family? Could it inspire an unknown visitor with the sense of trust required to purchase something from the site? Even compel them to pick up the phone to inquire?

Building a professional website with a positive ROI requires both education & experience in the art and science of web design. Building a profitable website requires the artistic talent to layout a page and the technical competence to code it correctly. A successful website involves experience with Internet marketing, search engine optimization, Pay-per-click campaigns, website traffic analysis, conversion tracking, and, last but not least, multivariate A/B split testing to determine the best conversion methods.

Websites only have seconds to make an impression on first-time visitors. Entice them to read the copy. Visit an internal page of the website and allow you to convince them that you have the goods and services they want and need.

Think about it: you can search Google for anything. Scan the results, select a site, and click through. If the website doesn’t load quickly, easily, and immediately answer the question you’re searching for or offer the product or service you need… How quickly do you click the back button on your browser and continue down the search results? If you visit a site with its appearance not of the highest professional standard and looks dated, do you give it an opportunity, or do you click back?

While the internet is only about 25 years old, website design, coding, and styles have changed dramatically even in the last 10 years. As an example if you already have a site your current site maybe coded using tables, we have not built table based websites since 2005. The modern way to code web pages is to use CSS for positioning. CSS-built websites are not encumbered by the needless code to lay a page with tables. CSS further reduces a web page’s file size by removing the positioning code and style coding and relocating them to a separate file. Reducing the code to content percentage improves how search engines perceive your website and improves rankings. It also reduces the file size for each page, making them load more quickly. Light, fast-loading pages also rank higher.

Consider capturing market share on the internet in three steps:

1. Post a professionally designed website to the internet that represents your products or services.

2. Search engine optimize the pages of your website so that they are correctly interpreted by and ranked for the search terms related to your target market. This requires keyword research and a comprehensive tuning of your website’s primary pages. Depending on your market’s competition level, you may also need to increase your site’s link popularity to achieve high enough rankings to garner search engine referrals.

3. Optimize the website’s ability to convert visitors into sales, contacts, or your website objective. Conversion optimization is accomplished using website traffic analysis, conversion tracking, and multivariate A/B split testing to determine the best conversion methods for your visitors and market. Tests can be run for a multitude of variables, from the color of a web page to free offers, to determine what set of variables works best for the conversion of more visitors into contacts and actual clients.