Wayne Marsh, Guest Writer

Good employees are a company's best asset; they help the business profit through their diligence, commitment, and expertise.

Most business owners realise the correlation between winning employees and a successful business, and spend a great deal of time, effort, and money to recruit and retain the best to staff their company.

But, what about their website? Many business owners don't recognise the similarities between high-performance employees and high-performance websites.

If you compare the two, you'll see how similar they really are, and from there, you can take steps to help your business' website become your 'employee of the month'.

Your best employees are those who perform consistently, and truly work for the company. If an employee does not work hard for you consistently, it's not likely that you would keep him or her on staff. The same principle should apply to your website. A great website works for your business, not against it.

Your website, if optimised correctly for search engines and marketed effectively, will bring online visitors to you, and will help convert these visitors to customers.

A great employee works well with your customers; so should your website work well with visitors to your site. Websites that are basic online brochures are simply not effective.

Effective website

An effective website should contain a wealth of resources for your customers, including downloadable resources such as white papers, answers to frequently-asked questions, and opportunities to contact the company and offer feedback.

You expect your employees to understand what is required of them and to apply businesses fundamentals and best practices in their job. Your website should be no different. A website that is built to industry standards and utilises industry best practices for design and functionality will be effective and appreciated by your customers.

Implementing best practices such as web accessibility guidelines is simply a smart thing to do as the online world becomes more focused on the end-customer's needs.

Networking has long been an important part of business. Employees who network effectively are a great asset to you since they will increase your visibility within the local market place. Effective websites apply the same principle through reciprocal link programmes.

Linking to another website that your customers would find beneficial, and having them link to you in return, increases your visibility in search engines like Google and Yahoo! Reciprocal link programmes are beneficial to both businesses, and the added, pertinent links on the site are beneficial to the website user as well.

Consistent achievement

Employees are measured by their consistent achievement of specified goals, for example, sales and production targets. Your website must also consistently meet and exceed the online targets you specify. Some common online targets are sales leads, sales, membership sign-up and ad revenue earned. Consistent achievement of assigned targets will ensure a return on your investment in both your employees and website.

Your website, just like your employees, should change and evolve as its role in your business changes in order to ensure that their 'skills' do not become obsolete.

Websites should be designed in a way that makes them easily updatable. If you do not update your website with current information and leading-edge technologies, your readers will become disenchanted with it and are less likely to return to it.

Only when your website starts working for you as diligently and effectively as your best employees, will you see how much it can benefit your business.

Wayne Marsh is a consultant for WSI, an Internet consulting company. Email: marshwa@wsiwebprofits.com.