There was a time when having a website was pretty cool. It didn’t matter what it looked like, or how hard it was to find things, if you had a website you were ahead of the curve. However, over time your soaring web presence has slowly become very bad at truly representing your business online.
New websites are not exempt from this. Make sure to regularly review that what you have built is being effective. If you want to improve, you have to ask yourself this honest question, is my website effective?
What happened?
As the web has grown and matured, so have the expectations of your customers. There are certain things that have become expected when it comes to online customer service. Just like a waiter at a restaurant, your website brings your business to your customers. It meets the customer at the doors, responds to their requests, takes their orders, and brings the things they want directly to their table with a smile on its face.
If your website is difficult to find, look at, navigate, or load, those same customers will be left unsatisfied and frustrated. This means they will avoid your website, which is not your goal at all. You want your customers to love your website, to enjoy navigating it, so that you can meet their needs and put a smile on their face.
What are the next steps?
So what are some real action steps to start making your website more effective?
- Start by writing down your website goal. If you had to put down what the purpose of your website is in one sentence what would it be? Then do the same for each major page of your website. Don’t start this with more than five pages; the goal is baby steps, especially if you have hundreds of pages.
- Now that you have a goal, how is your website meeting that goal? Are there things that could be added, removed, ironed out, re-worded, or made clearer?
- Remove your hit counter and add a real website analytics, such as Google Analytics or Clicky. This will give you honest feedback about who is using your website, where they are, what they are doing, and if you are actually converting on your goals.
- Review your website with your friends and customers. Sit them down or ask them next time they drop in and ask them where they get stuck, what they find frustrating, or what is missing that should be more obvious.
- Now you will have the knowledge to start making educated changes based on what you have found. You can also view the effect of those changes in your analytics and make tweaks that will help your website grow into the future.
How do I get started?
Message us right now. Not only can we help you implement these items, we can also bring some new ideas that may work better for your particular website. Your business is awesome; build yourself an effective website that represents that.
