Your website shouldn’t look the same as it did 12 months ago…
This is something we say a lot. Although to some of our clients it comes as a bit of a shock. For many small businesses getting their own website amounts to a tick-box exercise. Everyone has a website, so I need one right? (Yes, right… but we might be a little bias) Their finished website is generally a static brochure site that rarely changes if at all.
But the reality is, if you are actively using your website – your website WILL change over the course of 12 months. Now, we’re not talking full-on website refresh or rebrand here. Changes are usually small but cumulative. It might have more blog articles, or you might have automated some processes in your business via the website or even built some landing pages for new services or other marketing activities. There can be a whole host of things that can change on your website from regular use. But your website; it’s footprint, should look different. And that’s good because that can drive even more impactful change…
How can using my website drive more change?
If you’ve been using your website, you’ll be collecting data. Analytics. This information will allow you to make better decisions when it comes making changes on your website.
So let’s run through a simple example we’ve seen many times.
You’ve just had a new website done and you’ve outlined some blog articles to publish over the course of 12 months. During the first 3 months you complete some impressive projects and want to shout about it – and rightly so, you’re good at what you do and you want people to know. So you post these as case studies via blog articles. Over the course of the next 9 months those case studies start to generate more and more traffic. Both because you found your sales team are actively sending people to them and your potential customers want to see examples of your work.
When we come to review the website, you advise us that your sales team have been using the case studies as a sales tool and the analytics would show this content is generating traffic. So, what change might that drive? Knowing what we know, it might be a good idea to give Case Studies their own section on the website and make them more prominent with the aim of filtering traffic through to this content. Maybe even create a contact form to drive conversions at the end of each case study.
So in this example we identify content that is working well on the website and created a sales tool for the business. In the scheme of a whole website, it’s a fairly small change. But you can see how a few of these changes over the course of 12 months (or longer) will begin shape and change someone’s website ultimately making it perform more effectively for the business.
Ultimately there are 2 things that should drive change on any website.
- What you as a business need from the website (note, this might differ from what you want)
- What your customers or potential customers need from the website (this too might differ from what you want)
Small Business Quicklaunch Websites.
If you’d like to have a chat about your website and possibly get some ideas of changes or improvements you could make or to see how Quicklaunch could help you then please get in touch for a free consultation.
While we do sell websites. We don’t want to just be a more affordable or better option compared to our competitors. One of our goals when working with new and existing clients is mapping out where they think the site could be in 12 months time and what that might look like. That’s the site we’re helping them build…