Are you disappointed with the results of your online marketing? Do you feel your online marketing efforts all seem too expensive and inefficient? The problem could lie with your website. In this article, Net Branding’s digital marketing expert reveals some of the pitfalls lurking in website design and how to avoid them so you can create the best business website for your business.
Is your business website doing the job it was built to do, namely converting visitors into customers?
Your website is the most important online marketing tool you have, so you need to have the best business website possible. If your business website is faulty, then that’s very bad news for the future success of your business online.
Given how crucial websites are for businesses in today’s online world, it’s still surprising how many business websites don’t actually do the job they were built to do. Even worse, by the time a business realises their website is a bit of a dud, it’s too late because it’s already been built and the funds earmarked to build it has been spent.
If this describes your situation, what can you do about it? We’ll get to that shortly. But first, we need to find out why the problem occurred in the first place. So then, why are so many business websites not living up to their task? To answer that, let’s look at what a business website is supposed to do.
What’s the main task of a business website?
Your business website has two main tasks that it needs to perform, namely:
- Your website has to represent your brand in an appealing way
- Your website has to do the work of converting visitors into customers
To achieve the first task, you contract a web designer to build a website that looks good and is a credit to your brand. Achieving the second task is the role of your marketing person. Getting your business website to work as far as marketing is concerned is all about driving traffic to the website and then ensuring the website is up to the task of converting visitors into paying customers.
However, while the business website that the designer creates and hands over to the marketing person might have all the bells and whistles from a look and feel perspective, it might not be at all suitable for what the marketing person needs it to be able to do. Disaster!
Getting the design for business websites right
The process usually starts with a web designer coming up with a beautiful design that they and the respective business owner find pleasing on the eye. Once they agree on the look and feel, the web designer writes the necessary code or uses custom code in a website builder, to bring the design to life. And then they hand it over to the marketing person…
Because web designers create websites and then marketers do their thing to drive traffic to it, a good web designer will think and act like a real team player – by creating a website in which various people can work successfully together over the life of the website.
All too often, unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Instead, the code the web designer uses to lock in the website’s beautiful appearance often means that the website is no longer flexible enough for the marketing person’s needs. Which means the marketer won’t be able to make the necessary and continuous tweaks that will enable the website to fulfil is marketing role.
In order for your marketer and their digital marketing efforts to be successful, your business needs a flexible website that can be tweaked and updated on the go. We’ll say it again – the key to having a business website that works like it should lie in having a flexible website.
What exactly is a flexible website?
A flexible website is one that is built using flexible themes so you can move around elements, like the navigation, easily add or remove features, and tweak content. All so you can create the right digital marketing environment in order to easily and efficiently generate leads, conversions and sales.
Choosing the right website builder is key
In order for your business website to be the efficient and effective marketing tool that you need it to be, it needs to flexible enough to be able to adapt to the ever-changing needs of your digital marketing efforts.
The most important decision you can make to enable this lies in selecting the right website builder. While there are many website builders available, for example, WordPress, Wix and Squarespace, it’s important to use the right one in order to achieve the best business website.
Which website builder should I use?
Simply go with the world’s most popular website builder – WordPress. The fact it has been used to create as much as 60% of all websites means it’s best for creating flexible business websites. That’s because it’s rich in features and tools that enable marketers to do what they need to do to get their websites ranking in search engines and converting traffic into leads and sales. And because so many use it, there are always plenty of people that can jump in and help, instead of being at the mercy of an individual web designer to tweak their bespoke creation.
Just make sure you use a popular WordPress theme that has been used a lot or that has released a number of versions. While that might mean you lose a little uniqueness in the look and style of your website, it also means that most of the bugs will have been sorted already.
What about the other website builders?
The simple answer is that the others are not online marketing-friendly.
For example, while web designers do like to build websites using Squarespace because it enables them to get good-looking websites up quickly, Squarespace doesn’t enable marketers to do the required search engine optimisation (SEO) work to achieve the necessary search rankings for generating organic traffic. So, if Squarespace doesn’t provide what you need to ensure your business website works like it should, why would you go with it?
Another popular example of a website builder is Wix, but again it’s not friendly towards digital marketing efforts. And while it has similar SEO issues as Squarespace has, it also doesn’t allow the various third-party tools that digital marketers use to generate the data that helps them understand what’s working and not working on the website from an online marketing point of view.
How do I get my business website working like it should?
Once your flexible website is up and running it’s time for your marketer to start driving some traffic to it so they can gather the necessary data to see what on the website is working and what’s not. And then they’ll have to make all sorts of tweaks. So there’s no such thing as creating a perfect website first off.
To get your website working, you’ll need to go through it page by page, tweaking features, content, images, layout (just about everything) as you go. Remember, the ultimate aim of the process is to make the whole experience of your website simpler, easier and more responsive for your visitor, no matter what device they use to access it. After all, if it isn’t, you can kiss the whole conversion objective goodbye.
Every website will have trouble spots that need to be sorted. Most times you’ll only realise where the trouble spots are when you have the real-time data to show you where visitors are experiencing problems. For example, which pages are taking too long to load, which fields on forms cause people to give up and abandon the form, where content or headings are causing confusion. The list can be long.
Then, only once you’ve tweaked your business website enough to sort the problems, should you ramp up your digital marketing activities with the aim of driving lots more traffic to your website. At which point the website should be working like it’s meant to be and conversions are heading skywards.
Want to design the best business website for your business?
If you’d like expert help to design the best business website for your needs, then talk to the team at Auckland digital marketing company Net Branding. The team at Net Branding have been designing and building flexible business websites for our clients for years. Our experience in website design, coupled with our end-to-end digital marketing service, ensures that our websites not only do the job of representing the various brands in appealing ways but are also effective at converting visitors into customers and driving online business success.
Get in touch with us today – we’re just a phone call or click away.
