A website is a 24/7 salesperson that works for you 365 days and year and 366 days on leap years. You can’t have a better staff than your website. Your website makes your entire business function 10x better, but that is only when your website is built and maintained right. Just like every other asset, the best way to maximize the value that your website has to offer is to invest in it, on a continuous basis. What does that even mean? Well, put simply, your website can die a quick or slow death if you fail to perform consistent SEO, make updates, ensure that your website is responsive, make the right integrations and ensure that your messaging on your website actually makes sense. Oh and don’t forget the right hosting will save you from rushing your website to the ICU of the internet every other fortnight (remember all the times your WordPress host had technical issues or plugins were updated with you knowing what else to do?) Yup, we can help you with a better website solution for your business and e-commerce store.
So how important is a website to your business? Very important. Unless of course you only want your neighbours, friends and family to buy from you. If you want to run an actually competitive business in 2023, you need a website. Some businesses need an app. But then let’s take it one step before the other.
Here are 5 things you need to know to help you make a better business decision about your website
No human being has the power to do what your website can do for you. That is to engage with millions of customers at the same time, delivering an excellent experience to each customer and converting as many site visitors as possible to paying customers. And it does this, every second of the day. Employee burnout is well documented after 32 hours of actually working a week and the quality of the customer experience is never constant, even from your best employee. But with your website, you have a digital person you can trust to deliver the perfect marketing and sales experience to your clients globally, without complaints or calling in sick.
Believe it or not, consistent user experience is one of the fastest and most organic ways to build your brand and establish loyal customers who will not only do business with you but recommend your services to the next best person that needs your service. When was the last time you recommended a business with a terrible salesperson to someone else or shared the link to a bad website with someone you care about or value? If your website is not consistent with the experience it gives everyone, it is not being responsive and that is a problem. Next up, let’s discuss responsiveness.
Most of your customers will visit your website via their mobile devices. You can’t have them wondering why they can’t navigate your website without stress on their mobile device. This is quite simply one of the easiest ways to kill your website and to a large degree your business. I want to experience a consistent and high degree of ease of use regardless of the device I am using in browsing a website.
Most business owners who build their websites themselves miss this part. They see the homepage looking good on the web builder and don’t bother to test the entire website for responsiveness. Don’t worry, we are aware that you are not a professional web designer, which is why we provide a 360 web design and e-commerce solution for you.
A website like any other asset or tool, needs top notch integrations and support systems to consistently accomplish the desired business goals. Most 3rd party integrations/apps cost you monthly subscription fees and some of them are known to also be unstable. This is particularly more common in the Wordpress world vs. the Webflow world or Shopify world. Although we build across all platforms, we need to know what the business goals are and the business budget in order to help clients choose the best integrations for their businesses. One wrong line of code in the integration process can set everything off. Choosing wisely is one thing, integrating properly is another thing. In any case, make sure that you are choosing a 3rd party software that is directly contributing to your business goals and supporting other marketing and logistics efforts.
Here is a list of integrations we typically recommend (again it depends on your business needs): stripe for payment processing, Calendly for booking appointments, Google analytics for tracking users web behaviour and is the most popular tool for this purpose, Mailchimp for marketing automatons. The list is much longer, but then again remember that it all depends on the business needs. Don’t pay for what is not useful to your business growth.
Like I always tell clients, “this is the first iteration of your website, the goal is that it evolves over time into something better”. When it comes to your website, remember that change is constant. As your business evolves, so does your website. Do not be caught in the perfection trap. There is no perfect website in this world, we only have websites that fulfill most of the business goals or websites that do not fulfill enough business goals.
Just like any other aspect of life, you add or remove things from your website as you continue on your business journey. Remove pages, buttons, images or sections that are not contributing to your business growth and most likely reducing the quality of your user experience. Replace them with contents and products that users actually want. Remember that change is constant. This is applicable to everything including your website.
When it comes to how your website should look, remember to keep it simple. Less is more. A lot of people want so many animations and graphics on their website, without realizing that they are doing more harm than good. You end up distracting your customers from what it is that you actually need them to do. Unless you are a graphics designer, illustrator or in the arts, refrain from distracting your customers. Also remember, these things make your website slower and that results in a bad user experience which also means that your website will not convert enough users to be clients. Translation: Doing too much is bad for business.
Keep it simple from the design (UI) to messaging to the user flow. Your customers are coming to your website to fulfill a specific tasks, help them make that choice as quickly as possible before they get distracted by that TikTok notification. If your customers find your website too tacky or hideous to navigate, they will return to Google and ask for other recommendations because they don’t trust you. This also hurts your SEO efforts because Google is noticing that there is a consistent number of unsatisfied visitors to your website. Remember what we agreed on earlier, nobody recommends a shitty website to anyone. Book a consultation with us today for a website analysis and we can help you clean up your existing website or maybe build something better for you.
We are now at the end of this article, remember that this 5 things are things that you need to know from a technical point of view. Check back with us for 5 things you need to know for your website from a marketing point of view. In summary of this post, your website is a brilliant sales asset that needs to be designed, built and maintained properly with nothing but essential plugins and 3rd-party apps integrated that fuel your business goals. Do not overcomplicate thighs for your customers, keep your website simple, responsive and accessible. And remember, as your business grows, do your website- change is constant even for websites.
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