Product Spotlight: Website Revisions — Design, Plan and Execute
Using the analogy of the website as the virtual window to your business, would you leave your 1980s cafe curtains in the window in 2012? Not even if you owned a cafe. For many reasons aside from fashion, your website needs to be updated from its 1999 or even 2005 appearance, structure, and capabilities.
To draw prospective customers to your virtual doorway, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial. SEO enables your business to work its way to the top of the search result lists for like businesses. Otherwise, prospects looking for your exact type of business may never become aware of your existence. If your website was constructed over 10 years ago, SEO was in its infancy and may or may not have been applied to your website and its pages. Even if it was applied then, search engines have become dramatically more sophisticated. In order to keep pace and retain your spot at the top, keyword and content revision needs to occur.
The equivalent of store fixtures in a website is the design of the pages themselves and the tools used to create that design. A website developed using raw, unadorned HTML will look, to the savvy consumer, like an amateur production when compared to current web development creations. You wouldn’t display your merchandise on 1960s grocery gondolas or greet your customers from behind roll top desks. Don’t give them a similar impression with an obsolete web presence.
Embedded multimedia links (video and audio) to tout your services and display your products can add invaluable allure to your website when well implemented. Mobile apps bring similar modern accessibility to handheld devices on a scale designed specifically for them without needing a browser.
Once the customers get to your virtual storefront, what they find needs to reflect your current business and provide accurate information. Any website that goes unrevised for more than a year or two will inevitably develop anachronistic elements — advertised services that are no longer a part of the enterprise, products that have been discontinued, and informational links that are outdated. Cleaning these up to provide an accurate depiction of the business is crucial to acquiring and maintaining a faithful customer base.
For all these reasons and more, there is no better time than the present to consider website revision. Forrester Research found that the ROI for a website revision could be as much as 500%. Allowing 4 to 6 weeks for the planning, design, and creation process, with some additional time for testing before going live, your business could be engaging in a new level of business success in less time than it takes for a physical remodel — with no displacement of employees or customers.
If you bring Strategic eMarketing the look you would like to achieve, whether of your own design or from another site which you would like to emulate, their expert web designers can make it a reality for you. Before the new version is submitted to your hosting server, consider migrating to a Strategic eMarketing server as well. You could save both money and downtime (which can be costly) by moving to a more stable and economical platform.
Call Strategic eMarketing at 707-506-6138 to find out how your website could be updated to better serve you and your customers.