Many small businesses fail to take advantage of the great, low cost marketing opportunities found on the web and make costly mistakes which can be easily avoided.
Where are you?
I don’t get it but a lot of small businesses think hiding their contact information is a good idea. I could get into why your contact information on every page is good for localized search engines, or how it could help regional linking but you know what? It’s simply common sense for a business to want prospects to be able to find them. If you’re a public facing business (retail, restaurant etc) your address should be on every page, it’s that simple. Other companies need an easy to find link, clearly labeled to a contact page.
What do you do?
Honestly, I’m a web designer and half the time I can’t figure out what companies do based on their website. Does your website over think the process? Most do. If you’re a restaurant, post a menu. If you’re an inn, show me your rooms. Post your product or service in the easiest, clearest way possible.
No Images
The only thing worse than a website without contact details? A boring, stale, dull one with lots of text. Pictures say a thousand words right? Well, stop typing so much and buy a $100 camera. Take pictures of your products and people, let me see your lobby, reception area, board room and then I’ll feel better about spending money with you.
Your Company is Run By Robots
Web site are not about technology, stop worrying about fonts and colors. Let me see your people, this goes back to the picture issue above but honestly, it’s worth a second point. Who’s won awards this month? New hires? Experienced professional? Let me know! By the way, having a video on your website is brilliant, people love videos.
Fire and Forget Web Sites
Nothing ticks me off faster than a business who launches a website and ignores it. The Internet is the first place your prospects are going to go to, and they’ll simply move on if ignore them. Answer every email, provide updated content, add a blog to keep content fresh and follow up on every comment on your site. Prompt service wins business.
Outdated Content
If your business wants to succeed, respect your website is an extension of your physical business. Look at it all the time, assign it to somebody in your office or if you can’t afford the time, assign it to me but for the love of all that is digital … Christmas is over in December, make sure your website isn’t promoting St. Nick by News Years. The same goes for the big trade show, holidays, news events and staffing requests.
Butchering the Brand
If your website doesn’t look like your brochure, fire your web designer. Honestly, there’s no reason for your logo to be different on a website. There’s no reason you don’t look as good no, scratch that. There’s no reason you don’t look BETTER on the web than you do in print or in person. Think about it, full color printing costs money but on the web, it’s free.
Broken Down Sites
A 404 Error is the technical term for a website page that no longer exists. 500 is the error code for sites which failed to execute a PHP script from your site … if your clients ever see this, you have no business running a website.
Web Sites Designed by Friends and Family
If your cousin is an award winning designer, hire her but if she’s a database administrator or makes a living putting monitors on desks for a living … walk away. Your website is an extension of your brand, it’s about marketing not technology so hire a designer with a proven track record building quality sites.
Typo’s and Mistakes
Broken images, grammatical errors, poor spelling … these are signs of a business owner who doesn’t care about the company and that tells me that they’re not going to care about the product they sell. Before a website goes live, make sure it’s done.
Effective online marketing is easy, it’s cost effective and it’s a key element of the marketing program of a modern, success business.
If you’re already running a website, take a few moments and ask yourself:
- Does my website look better than my business card?
- Does my website tell my clients what I do?
- Does my website tell prospects how to reach me?
- Is my website easy to use?
- Is my website’s content fresh?
Once you’ve asked yourself those questions, ask 20 other people those five simple questions about your website and really listen.
This is a complete edit of my earlier One Night in Paris theme for WordPress, I build the original theme over a year ago and have spent a lot of hours improving my skills since then, so here’s my latest free WordPress theme release for everybody to download and enjoy.
