Rebuild your website

I’m finding myself saying this a bit lately. Not out of any need to be overtly critical but in answering a fundamental question – why does your business have a website? I see a lot of sites that are built purely with the objective of having a net presence instead of really thinking it through as a marketing tool. That begins with thinking about your sites visitor.

It’s not an interruption medium – they are there for an immediate answer to a problem and if your site opens with you, you, you they’ll be another bounce statistic on your Google Analytics (you are using analytics of some sort, aren’t you?)

Firstly, eliminate all the weasel words and phrases;
Company X is a leading provider in…
..we employ best practice to…
…results oriented…
…maximize…

You get the picture.

Obviously the language you use should be what suits who you are trying to sell to, some sectors may require a degree of obtuseness (but I doubt it). People are not buying your product/service, they don’t care about your product/service, they care about a solution to one of their problems.

Some other things to consider when looking at your site and assessing if it needs a refresh:

Has your site been reviewed in the last three years?
You’re not using brochures from three years ago are you? What on earth makes your website any different? Your website should be the most dynamic piece of marketing you have leading onto the next point.

Does your site have a CMS that allows you to quickly and easily modify content and add pages if need be?
This need not be expensive and it is crucial. How can you test landing pages or different copy if you have to call your designer every time you want to do something?

Is your site built in Flash?
Get rid of it. Unless you are well known enough that people are going to type your exact name into search engines to get to your site then a building your site in flash has just made you invisible to search engines. If you want fancy graphics with nice transitions then make it a PART of your page but building your whole page inside Flash will nullify any potential marketing benefit to having a website – that is what you have a website for, isn’t it?

Has it been optimised for SEO?
URL names, meta-data, keywords, file structures, alt tags. There’s a whole range of on-site SEO that should just be standard in your sites build. Ask your designer about this. In looking at peoples sites I have seen designers that have put only THEIR details into the meta-tags for a clients site – not polite.

Then there’s the whole Social Media bit, but that’s what the rest of this site is about. This is just a few things to get you thinking. If your copy is about YOU, if your site requires a third party to change something as basic as contact info or add more pages, if you have no idea what SEO your site has had done, you may want to think about a rebuild.

(Image by: ttstam)

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