Website and the proverbial paycheck

Our philosophy is that your website is your 24x7 sales person and is an employee of your organization. Only by treating your website as an employee will you be able to benefit from the expertise that they bring to the table. Your website should obviously explain what your services are. Your website should not just "sit there" and collect what proverbial paycheck. Would you hire an employee, explain to them everything your business does and then let them sit there and do nothing to better your business? If the answer is yes, then stop now, as this post is not for you! If on the other hand you feel that to earn a paycheck that, your employee must provide a level of effort to promote your business than this article is for you.

Initial Design Period

In the site creation stage the marketing of colors, content, and pictures go into every site when created with the best intentions of success. The designer, marketing and graphics company (if there is one) and content creator all want your website to be the visible and success website on the internet.

Honeymoon Period (On-going Maintenance)

When an organization finally goes live with their website they are promoting it left and right, the employees are also promoting it and the customers are love the design and structure you've provided for them. Everything is going swimmingly. You see the activity to increase, the interaction between customers and your staff increase, and the world through your eyes are only seeing the dollar signs your site will bring to you.

Complacency Period

As with any employment, situation complacency can set in over time. Complacent employees may begin to suspect that the company's success fine. They may see that the website's traffic is up and sales are up so there is no reason to make a change (do not mess with the status quo). This thought process is actually detrimental to your website and is the start of opening up your website to collect a paycheck without earning it. As time goes on pages on your website will become broken (page not found [error 404], have outdated material on existing products and services, not serve up the new products and services that you offer, and may no longer be able to take care of your customers changing needs).

Forgiveness and Repair Period

When you make a mistake, and we all do, the key is asking for forgiveness. We need to know that are website should be, and is; a living and breathing (well maybe not truly breathing) machine. That it has one sole purpose and that is to take care of your customers whether they are happy or sad in a positive and efficient manner. Once you have accepted this and you have stated "I am going to take care of my employee [website]". To repair your website you need to do the following.

1. Data analytics – You have been collecting information about your visitors (hopefully). Look who your visitors are (types of devices they are using, where they are coming from, keywords they are using, how they navigate your website, etc.). With this information available and in-hand, you can do the other tasks efficiently and with some factual numbers.
2. Is the website meeting today's business needs?
3. Is navigation easy and intuitive today?
4. Are all of the links accurate, active and titled correctly?
5. Content – Content should be current and accurate. Set your priority based on how users are interacting with your website. This not only goes for the text of your website but the images, downloadable documents, etc.
6. Have you optimized your content, existing and new, so that it complies with the latest algorithms from Google, Yahoo and Bing?
7. Do you have proper ties to, and from, the social media networks you use?
   1. Are you keep those social networks up-to-date as well?
8. Do you have terms and conditions, privacy statements and information related to your contact policies up-to-date with your company policies?
9. Have you updated your © copyright in your footer?
10. If you have a newsletter are you keeping up with it?
    1. When was the last time you sent out a newsletter to your local customers?
11. Setup a procedure, and keep it, for reviewing and keeping your website up-to-date, updating your social media strategy as well as keeping the search engines up-to-date.

JM2 Webdesigners is here to assist you through the entire process and are ready to help you make your website [employee] an efficient part of your business. You can contact us at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@.