5 Wrong Ways To Think About Your Website

By Arthur Cundy

Mickey B. Photography

Your website is an online business card.

Business cards are cards containing business information about a company or individual. These pieces of paper are exchanged during introductions. Your website should do much more than that. It’s should just display information. It should grow your brand and revenue. Your website needs to be a marketing machine. It needs to turn browsers into buyers.

Use your website to not just give out basic information but to allow it to be the window to your company. Display biographies, resumes, and awards to show that you have experience and know what you are talking about. Include office photos and videos to show your office culture. You can also put services, product decriptions, testimonials, directions, locations, customer service, blogs, ebooks, etc. The sky’s the limit.

I know how I want my website to look.

With all due respect. No you don’t. I mean you may have some idea but there is a reason you hired a web designer right? Your web designer is skilled in this area and you will do well to use and listen to their expertise. Your website is not used for your personal art gallery. It is for your visitors. The people you want to become your customers and clients. Build it for them. Make them happy and you will be happy.

I have seen and heard many examples where people micromanage their web designer. And the end result is a website that they liked but didn’t generate any business for them. Isn’t that a waste of money?

Read this to see how web design can go straight to hell.

I want a boatload of traffic to my website.

Bigger isn’t always better. Which would you rather want? 1 million random people who have no clue what you do or sell and probably is not interested in it? Or 2000 people who specifically need what you have to offer? I’d take the latter. Also, you can get 2000 targeted visitors easier, faster, and with less money than 1 million. Focus on your audience/market, go after them, not everybody and their grandmother.

I need a new design, quick!

Who said so? Your customers? Please find out. It may be you trying to give yourself something to do. Choose a good web designer and get it done right the first time. Then test it, updated it with good content, enhance it. You don’t need to redesign every month/year just to “keep up”. How is your audience supposed to get used to your brand if you keep changing it.?

For example: I once did some work for a publishing company. They would redesign their websites every 2-3 months or so. This was done for 2 reasons. They felt that by always changing the design it showed that they were getting better and doing bigger things. The second reason is that their main competitor was enhancing their website so they wanted to be better than them. This constant redesign wasted alot of time, energy and money. Site visitors were confused. And it didn’t benefit the company. In fact, they are no longer in business.

My website is enough.

In this day and age social networking is a huge tool to communicate with people who are interested in what you do. Spread your nets wide and have as many social networking profiles as possible. Link and integrate them on your website. Create videos and distribute them. Submit and integrate your blog rss feed everywhere you can. You want your brand, message and content to be found everywhere not just on your website.

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• 14Apr2010
• 2
• See more in Resources, Website Design business, marketing, web design, website