Website tips with Michelle Whitmore of Zeald.com

When it comes time to prepare the content for your website, the trick is to go back to the analysis you've done of the target audience and to work your way forward from there.

If you've done this analysis well, you should know their fears, questions and problems and you should understand the barriers they have to doing business with you. Irrespective of your industry, one of the first questions that springs to mind is ‘who are you and can I trust you?'

The best way to answer this question is to put a lot of energy and effort into your ‘About Us' section.

At Zeald, we provide a free website auditing service and all too often we see an ‘About Us' page that has three paragraphs and a picture of a building, yet people do not do business with a building. Your prospective clients deserve more than that, particularly if they have come to your website via a search engine and this is their first introduction to you.

If you're stuck for ideas on what to write, then why not start with your mission, your values and your history. Perhaps you can put profiles of all your staff members and their interests – you might even want to use video to ‘talk' to prospects in the first person. Over and above this, you may have a recruitment policy and on-going training policy that really makes you stand out from the crowd. If so, put it on your website.

Remember that the internet is an impersonal medium, so you should use your ‘About Us' section as much as possible to present yourself in the best possible light to people who are new to your organisation.