After taking a good, long, honest look at your business’s online identity, you have come to the realization that it is lacking. Maybe the look and feel is reminiscent of an Atari game. The only emails you receive from your website are from Nigerian Princes or offers to rebuild your website. Even though your site is old and out of date, trying to load up your website on a Smartphone is an impossibility with all of the flash navigation you have on it. Not to mention, the name of your site is www.2beornottoB.net, for all of your Shakespearean needs. How do we fix this without completely starting from scratch?
First, we’ll conquer the domain name issue. Your domain name is a main part of your branding. If you cannot line up your business name with your web name completely, you’d better have something close. Buying multiple domains, and pointing them all at the same site, is one way to help organize this. Just for fun, type in www.coke.com. Notice, it brings you to www.coca-cola.com. Try www.cocacola.com. Same thing, right? If your name could be confusing, or if there’s a chance that someone will type it in wrong, go out and buy yourself some extra domain names, and point them all at your site. Do your best to make sure that you have all of the possible names customer’s may accidentally put when looking for your name.
Next, if your website design hasn’t changed in the last couple of years, you probably need an overhaul. For one thing, any pictures you have of people may seem dated, due to their outfits. Even something as simple as blue jeans and a T-shirt can appear dated. Colors have come and gone out of style. Even your font choice may cry out “New, Inexperienced Company Here”. Keep your site current, with new graphics and style cues. Hint: there’s more than 16 colors allowed on computers now.
If you’re trying to get email from your website, have a form, not just your email address posted there for the world to copy. A form will help to limit some of the junk mail. Understand, there are still desperate people that will go and fill out your form, trying to sell you things, but at least they have to do it on your website. They can’t simply copy your email address into their mass email program and pepper you over and over again. It also makes things easier for your customer. For example, if a customer uses a web-based email system, like Yahoo, they have to copy your email address and LEAVE YOUR SITE to contact you. Do you really want them going off, onto a different site to contact you? Or do you think that they could be distracted when they leave your site, and go to their email? Who knows, maybe that Nigerian Prince has contacted them, too…
In case you didn’t know, people don’t want to read about your business. How many “About us” categories does one business need?(about us, our history, our goals, what we do, how we do it, when we do what we do, our beliefs, meet our staff, meet our staff’s family, meet our pets, our pet’s history and goals, etc…..) The primary subject of your website is your customer. Your website needs descriptions of your products, FAQ’s on how to use them best, contacts for sales or customer service, and a limited amount of social proof. Your website is a sales tool, to either directly sell your product or service right online, or to increase off-line sales. Make sure the point of your website is one click away at most. If you are selling goods, make the sales process easy. Don’t force the customer to fill out 20 different forms before they buy, or they won’t bother.
Remember, it’s about ease for the consumer, not for you.
We’ll tackle mobile websites tomorrow.
