All businesses probably need to have websites if they are going to be as successful as one would hope. But if you are not careful, you may find that your website is actually harming your business’ chances or its profits, rather than helping to boost them. It might not always be obvious that this is happening either, which can result in some pretty unfortunate circumstances that can then be tricky to get out of.
In this post, we are going to look into this in some detail, including working out how you can know whether your website is helping or hindering your business, and what changes you might want to make if you do indeed feel that it might be hindering it.
The Importance Of A Website
First of all, it might be helpful to discuss what the importance of a website is for your business, as this is something which you are going to want to be aware of from the start if you want your site to be effective. In general, a website serves a few main functions for a business. It is a place for customers to go in order to find contact details for your company. It’s also a marketing tool, and will help to bring in more people and hopefully convert them into customers themselves. And it can be a useful place to share news about your business, including new products and brand changes and so on.
As you can see, there are a lot of important reasons to make sure that you have a fully functioning website which is providing all of these benefits and possibly more. This is why a website is so important and why you need to look into whether yours is working as it should for the sake of your company.
First Impressions
One of the first things to look into here is whether or not your website is giving a good first impression of your business. You have to bear in mind that for a lot of visitors, this is often going to be the very first thing that they see of your business at all, so it really is a vital way to ensure that you are giving the best first impression you can. There are a lot of ways you might be able to do that, and it’s going to be essential that you are looking into this on a regular basis if possible.
For instance, does your homepage look enticing, or is it putting people off in some way? Looking into the bounce rate of your home page can be a really effective bit of data, so that is something that you are going to want to look into. You might also want to ask whether your brand is being represented the moment that someone clicks onto your site. If not, it could be that your site is not really doing your business any good at all, and you might want to look again at that.
Easy Contact
As well as providing a decent first impression, your website also needs to have a direct line through to your contact information, so that people can easily get in touch with you as and when it might be necessary. The clearer and easier it is for people to contact you through the website, the more you can say that the site has really done its job, so that is something that you are certainly going to want to focus on if you are keen to make that happen for you.
You can make this easier by having all of the relevant details in a box alongside the page on every page, or at least at the bottom through a Contact link. This is a really effective way to make sure that contact is as easy as possible. You may also decide that it is worth having a mailto link for the email address, and on mobile that they can click on the phone number to call you straight away. That will ensure that people get what they need, and that’s going to be good news for both the website and the business as a whole as well.
Clear & Simple Web Design
The overall design of the website needs to be as clear and simple as possible. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have any flourishes at all, but in general you want the experience to be easy and clutter-free, and that means that you need to have a web design that is stripped-back as much as possible while still providing all the necessary information and so on too. The best way to ensure that you get this is by hiring professional web designers, as they are going to know exactly how to make sure that your site is looking and functioning this way. So make sure that you seek them out as soon as possible.
Converting Leads to Customers
You may want to think about the issue of conversions too, and ask yourself whether or not your business website is working as a place of conversion. It might be that people are clicking through, signing up to your newsletters, and buying your products on the back of your website. If so, congratulations, because that is exactly what you are aiming for here. But if not, then you might want to take a look at what you can do to improve those conversions, and this might be easier than you think – it is also certainly worthwhile.
First of all, all of the above will actually help with conversions, so be sure to have looked into that. You will then also want to look specifically at the calls to action, as well as how they seem to be playing out. You’ll need to make sure that you are doing all you can to make these attractive and likely to be clicked on. If you can do that well enough, it will drastically improve the website and you will find that you are much happier with your business’ performance.
