Managing Your Website – Part 1: Maintaining A Website

These days, it’s a given that virtually every business, no matter how small, will have a website on the go. There are good reasons for this. On the sites of our clients, we not only display their entire product lineup, but also drill down into deeper information – such as product specifications, payment methods and financing offerings. 

You can use this kind of deep information to lead the user along to a conversion from being simply a viewer to being a customer. This type of dynamic interactivity is essential in the fast-paced modern marketplace. And there are a few other reasons to make the effort when it comes to maintaining a website:

• You need to have one because you can be sure your competition has one.
• Having a website confers authenticity. It might seem like you don’t have any authority within your sector if you fail to do the work of maintaining a site.
• A website can be a simple reflection of your company’s brand and values, but it can also be a sophisticated and powerful tool for driving sales, collecting data and conducting market research.

It’s helpful to think through what you’ll be using your site for prior to commencing the build. There are lots of ineffective websites out there – a little foresight and preparation can help ensure your site adds maximum value to your company’s marketing requirements. Some things to think about:

• What do you want the user to be able to do? Make sure those goals are obtainable. For example, if you want the user to be able to find more information about your products – finding it shouldn’t be hard to do. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter, make that process easy – don’t hide it, have a button or call to action somewhere on the home page.
• What visual messages about your company do you want to put into the world? A good website has good visual appeal, with a design that is pleasing to look at and that has a good blend of text, images, and video. It shouldn’t be overly complicated, or throw a lot of information at you all at once.
• What kinds of content do you want to include on your site? Will you include content marketing pieces such as white papers, e-books, how-to guides? How often can you reasonably refresh the content on your site? You should add new content at least monthly, but more frequently is better.

When a client comes to us with web management questions, they’ll usually have an idea of what they want to do and they might have some very specific requirements. We help them break it down – what kind of information do you want to collect from this website, what kinds of fields will be needed, who is going to create the graphics for it, what other elements do you want on the site, when do you want it to go live? Usually as we run through the list, the client with react and come up with a lot more things – it’s an evolving process.

For more, read parts 2 and 3 of this series.

Contact us to see what we can do to build and support your company’s custom website requirements.