Oct 17, 2013
No Comments
Is Your Website Working?
In today’s economy a website is essential to staying relevant and profitable for most businesses. But simply having a website does not guarantee any amount of success, especially if that website is poorly constructed. There are many ways to mess up a website, but the pitfalls below are common mistakes to make sure you and your company are avoiding.
1. Not Selecting or Overlooking Your Target Audience
As much as you would love to think that your product or service is relevant to anyone and everyone this is very unlikely. It is a well-established rule of marketing that you should always do the research to make sure you know and understand your target market. Your website should always reflect an understanding of your target market. If you are trying to create a website that targets everyone then you are most likely to end up reaching no one.
2. Missing a Definitive Call to Action
Do you have a clear goal in mind when it comes to how your audience should interact with your website? Customers and potential customers are most likely coming to your site with a goal or objective in mind. Your homepage should guide your website users to what they are seeking. How does your homepage lead your users to find or access what they need? Too often websites tend to be simply a collection of pages with all the data on them that we need. It is important that your websites design guides users to what they are looking for.
3. Not Frequently Updating Your Web Content
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is getting your website to the point where it can go live and then feeling like you are done with it. It is important to make updates to your website as frequently as possible. If your website is not up-to-date then it is about as useful as last month’s supermarket ads; not useful at all. Whether you provide goods or services or information, you need to keep all your website content up to date. If you are out of a product for a period of time then that should be made known on your website ASAP. If the price of your services are going to change then it should be made known on you website, ideally before the change occurs. If your website includes industry information, that information should always be as current as possible. If your website is out of date in any way, your customers or potential customers may think you have gone out of business, or even worse, they may lose trust in your business.
4. Your Website is Not Mobile Compatible
Another part of keeping your website up to date is understanding the current trends in technology. The mobile media market is bigger than ever. If your website cannot be easily viewed on a mobile device, chances are mobile users are not going to want to deal with accessing it. If this is the case then that is a portion of your target market that you are neglecting, and your profitability is being affected whether you know it or not. Make sure you optimize your site to be able to be viewed on all media devices if possible.
What other website mistakes do you see businesses frequently making?