As more consumers feel comfortable making buying decisions solely though online tools such as Google search and business websites, smart entrepreneurs know to put their best foot forward when it comes to their online presence. But have you looked at your website lately? Do you know what it says about you? Here are two common problems:

The internet gives every business owner the power to promote products and services on a national level with just a few clicks. Having a website is also an easy way to be “open for business” 24 hours a day.

When building your website, certain considerations and a lot of planning is needed to ensure that the site does exactly what you need it to do for your business.

Having studied, designed, tweaked, admired and critiqued hundreds of websites over the past eight years, we’ve come to know good websites. And one thing is clear: good sites, in fact the best performing sites, have a number of things in common. Here, we’ve put together a list of the essential elements of top performing websites. Getting yours up to scratch is easy when applying this simple methodology.