The Interested Client: Case for taking interest in your website.
One of my
favorite clients has a very good habit. Every time I go to him for a meeting
he is ready with printouts of the website statistics, reports of the enquiries he received and a set of questions and doubts he wants to clear with me. What comes out of these
discussions is a clear picture of
what is working on the site and what isn't.
Now I can't expect all or even some of my clients to be able to give the time to do that but the point I want to make is that this
client gets a lot more out of his site than many of my other clients simply by paying attention to his site.
Nothing beats the personal attention and care of the owner of the website. Left
to ourselves we do a great Search Engine
Optimization job but
what this
client brought to the table was personal experience in running the business day
to day which gave us a very clear idea of his goals, needs and ambition for the website.
All this leads to my next point, making your website an integral part of your business. Many businessmen treat
their websites as a marketing add-on rather than a central and important part of their marketing, branding and operations.
Many times prospective clients come to me saying that they require a website because ?nowadays every business has to have one' but they have no
clue about the potential that lies in a website if used properly.
Here are some tips to make sure you are squeezing the best value out of your website:
- Have a meeting with your web developer once a month or at least once in two months
- Review the site statistics and site performance with him/her.
- Discuss ways to improve these by making small incremental changes to the site every month.
- Ask your developer
about which new sections, features or tools can be added to the site and make sure you budget for them.
- Regularly browse the web yourself and view your peer websites for ideas and inspiration and to get a general idea of what's happening online.
- Make sure your marketing team is up-to-date about the website and are using it in their marketing efforts.
If you do the above regularly your website will grow and pay for itself and then some.
One more surefire hit idea before I
signoff.
If you have a website already running, create ANOTHER ONE. More about that in another post.
Cheers,
Ron
