When you discover you’ve made a bad hire, you usually don’t hesitate to fire the person–or to provide coaching and training to fix the problem(s), so that your employee is a happy, productive, contributing member of the team.

The same should be true of an unproductive website. You should assess your website so that you can determine whether you can fix it–or junk it, and start over.

Your website represents you. Some might even say, it is you. A finely tuned website could be working for you around the clock–helping spread the word about what you do, how you do it better than anyone, and creating opportunities with customers and prospects who need your products or services.

I realize that others have put together lists of factors that create a productive website, but I put this list together specifically for small business owners, if I’ve forgotten anything please feel free to add yours in the comment form!

7 Attributes of a Happy, Productive Website:

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 A ‘Gravatar’ is a ’Globally Recognized Avatar’.

An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.

Why is this important?

One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.

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