subject: 7 Reasons Your Local Business Website Sucks - Tips From Professional Calgary Web Design [print this page] 7 Reasons Your Local Business Website Sucks - Tips From Professional Calgary Web Design
A lot is said about your business's image by your website. People make assumptions by appearance.Your website is not only a place for visitors to come to learn more about your company. It's also apart of the branding process and contributes largely to the first impression your clients get of you and your business. Local businesses are especially bad for this. Now, while the condition of your website may not be a make it or break it deal for a potential customer, it's a good idea to revisit your goals and website objectives to ensure that it's up par. Customers may not be impressed by flashy graphics, but having a clean, attractive, straight forward and easy to use site should be the minimum goal for any small business website--or any website for that matter.
The following are 7 important areas for you to look at in assessing your website and moving onto the next step in your business's online presence.
1. You don't have a website, or it's just a parked domain.
Ever Google a business to find..nothing? Nothing besides online Yellow Pages ads and directory listings. It's important to have your business added to online listings, Yellow Pages, and directories. The problem is, none of these listings can really give the type of information about your business the visitor is looking for. What happens when a customer wants to find some information about your company's history? What happens when they want to contact you via e-mail? When someone Google's you, does your business look like 3/4ths of every other local business out there? Does your web presence give you an advantage over your competition? Is what you're currently doing answering these questions or solving these problems?
I've seen this many times in my business. We've helped a lot of other businesses accomplish that goal. More and more businesses are finding the value in having a website. More and more people are searching locally than sifting through the Yellow Pages or the local directories.
2. Your website doesn't give enough relevent or compelling information, and it lacks creativity.
Without content, your site has no real purpose. It's better than nothing, but most things are. Most sites have two goals. To give information about the company and it's products and services. And to lead to a sale or some business. Does your website do that? How well does it accomplish those goals?
A few years back, we built a website forDa Guido Ristorante in Calgary. This simple, clean website is a perfect example of what most small business websites should function. Da Guido has his menu on the website, a map showing how to get to the location of resturant and some customer reviews and distigueshed awards he has recieved in his career. Aside from that, he has the standard "about us" and "contact us" pages. The site is simple elegant and does the job. And most businesses can afford to have a website like that built, but most don't.
3. Your website has an old and outdated design, doesn't look professional, or is no longer compatible with the later standards.
Haven't had your site updated since the days of dialup? We deal with a lot of these as well. Businesses who have finally decided to update their website from way back when. They often say, the devil is in the details. This is so true. Letting things slip, year after year, until it eventually becomes a distaster. The design is outdated, the graphics look like they were put together with MS Paint, and there's nothing really appealing about the overall color scheme. Most of the clients we've dealt with are usually concerned about this aspect and we've build a ton of clients and quite a lot of business around just this. We find that this is something visitors are very aware of when they visit your site. It's not something to brush aside. Don't say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's always been broke, now fix it.
4. You don't track hits to your site, and therefor you have no real way of tracking results.
Don't track stats? Are you kidding me? How many visitors did you get last month? Where did they come from and where are they going? How long did they stay? Are they navigating around or are they just clicking out and leaving the first 10 seconds they came? I've found this to be a God-send, for my blog and for our clients. You really don't know what's going on with your site unless you're tracking your stats.
5. You've signed up to a free domain or don't have a real domain name.
A free sub-domain name yells, "CHEAP!!!" On top of that there's probably forced ads and annoying banners that go along with your "free" website. Ugly! Most real domain names only cost a few dollars a year. You can get them registered at GoDaddy, NetFirms, WhoIs.net...just Google "domain names."
6. You think SEO is an executive title--in other words--you're not using it.
SEO is nothing special or fancy. It's just a neccesity. How else are you going to get a high rank on search engines? Most web designers know enough about SEO to give your website a fairly high Google ranking. Our company website www.idesignit.ca has one of the highest rankings for the key phrase "Calgary Web Design" and "Web Design Calgary." The number one reason we get high traffic to our site.
7. You have to call a web designer every time you want to make a tiny change to your website.
Back in the old days we had to deal with this quite a bit. Everytime our clients wanted a small change made to the content, we'd do it for them and then we'd send them the bill. If it took us less than a couple minutes we wouldn't charge at all. But we felt that by eliminating the need for us to constantly update the website, we could save the clients money, as well as ourselves time and energy. So our genious programmer built a Content Management System, that has been adapted over the years, and that we now provide to most of our clients, for a small fee.
It pays to invest in a CMS or to speak with your web developer about giving you the capability to add and edit your own content with out the need of the developer. The developer and designers will still have to do the heavy duty work, editing templates and dynamic apps, but as far as content goes it will be all you. This makes things a lot more productive.
*BONUS* 8. You hired the wrong design company or the wrong developer to build you a website.
Anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can put an add in the paper and be in business. Though, the acid test is in the experience of the team or individual. What past work have they done? Are their customers happy? Are they professionals or amatures. You'll be able to tell that by their knowlegde and expertise, past work and their actions. Another thing to consider is, have they invested the time into their own business? In the end, it's always best to go with your gut. Never hire a company you have a bad feeling about.
