You are running a business and your business has a website. Well, great to hear that. So, how long has your business been operating? 1 year? 10 years? More than that? It sure must have been an exciting journey. You website would surely have been the stepping stone to reach these milestones. Hence, your existing website, its content, graphics, and functionalities need no more attention. You need to focus on other issues, right?
WRONG!
Times have Changed
You couldn’t wear the dress you bought in the late nineties to a corporate function right now, can you? It works the same way with your website. The customers of today are very much engrossed with latest trends and happenings. Your website should also reflect the same.
- Pay attention to the colors used in its theme.
- The content on your website shouldn’t sound like the voice of a 60 year old grandpa!
- Delete a lot of hocus-pocus about your company and its experience. What does the visitor gain?
Competition is Strong
There are several other businesses just like yours around the globe as well as right next to you! Why should the end-user visit your online presence? What is different about your website? Get practical! There are various firms that offer the same products and services just as yours. Many of them may even offer at much lesser prices. So, there should be something unique about yours.
- The theme of your website should reflect your brand-name. You can’t be running an educational institution and have a website theme that reflects a government department!
- Does your website have tools that automatically connect users to social media? C’mon! It is well-known that an ordinary citizen spends most of his or her time on the internet, browsing social media websites. Your website should be connected to and also should have a dominant presence on social media websites.
- Hey, do people know that your website or even your business exists in the first place? If not, how can they visit it? Your website should be easily visible and also well optimized to leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo as well as Bing.
The End-Users are Not Machines!
Get this straight! Your website shouldn’t function as a huge whiteboard with a lot of scribbling that makes no sense in the first place! Rub away massive chunks of unnecessary content that simply boasts about your company, its origin and its management team. Seriously? Why should the end-users even bother about these? They wish to know how your products or services will be useful; Period!
- Your website should be user-friendly and should load equally well on all devices; including mobile phones.
- It should be easily navigable with proper menus and pages for each piece of information.
- The content should be pleasing, convincing and understandable to a large section of people; not just your immediate audience. The language shouldn’t express “the voice of a bespectacled professor with a striped tie in a government college!” Keep it simple.
Remember, you are not selling products or services with your website. You are giving solutions to the website’s visitors. Well, me and my team at @SGS Technologie can help you develop a website for your business or revamp the existing one, to a model preferred by the end-users. I will give an update on it soon.
Yasir Sulaiman
Originally published at www.linkedin.com