Your website needs to perform several functions.

Before you design your site, it’s important to figure out what your brand is, and the way you want to portray yourself. Make a conscious effort to write the story of your business. You should literally sit down and compose the story of how you got to where you are.

Once you have your story hammered out, you need to cut out the vast majority of the narrative. Unfortunately, most prospects who visit your website will not be interested in reading a non-fiction tale your rise to glory. Instead, you need to take that story and distill it into a clean, concise, value proposition. Your value proposition should be a few sentences at most, and explain exactly what you bring to the table. Attention spans have never been so short, so your prospects need a crystal-clear message so they can understand exactly what you do the moment they visit your site.

Then you have to establish exactly what differentiates you from the competition. Chances are, if you are a service-based sales professional, then you are going to have a ton of competition. Showcase the things that make you unique. Enlist social proof. This means partnering with other companies you’ve worked with in the past, and producing high-quality testimonials from past clients.

Then you need to focus on exactly what you want your website visitors to do. Your call to action should be extremely clear, and you want the path to that CTA to be streamlined. If you are in a position to build landing pages, then you need to have a single CTA for a landing page. Your homepage might have a handful of different places you want visitor to go, but a landing page needs to be simplified to a single purpose. Be direct, be straightforward, and make conversion as easy as possible for the prospect.

Then, when all is said and done, make sure that your contact information is easily accessible.