What’s the key to making your ADR website a must-read for prospective mediation clients and your target market?
It’s simple. And mediators will get this right away: Make it useful. You make yourself very useful to your clients, so why not to your prospective clients as well?
Business blogging pro Chris Garrett, whom I had the good fortune to meet and learn from at SOBCon ’08, offers wisdom for just how to do it. Here’s an excerpt from his How to Build a Useful Site:
The key to a happy, return visitor is to
- Promise benefits in your titles and headlines and actually deliver on it.
- Make your navigation suit the missions your readers are on.
- On your homepage provide links for first time visitors who want to explore and long time visitors who read via the web and not RSS.
- Individual articles should provide the content they promise, then provide links to more on the same subject.
- Add clear signposts to all your best stuff, and your subscription options, while keeping your visitor on the scent of their hunt with series, related articles and category links.
For more on the topic, try these:
- From Chris G: Does your site frighten readers away?
- From Chris G: Does your website have these friendly features?
- From Mediator Tech: 4 questions your ADR website should answer immediately
- From Mediator Tech: Beyond an online brochure: 5 purposes for an ADR business website
- From Mediator Tech: How does your website look in other browsers?
And subscribe to Chris’ blog. He’s among the best. And a very nice guy.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.