Thursday, September 13, 2012

WWW: What's Wrong with your Website?


Many business people in professional services may have a dark memory about creating their website. It involves spending countless, painful, non-billable hours working with consultants who they didn’t really understand and in the process spending more money than they ever wanted in order to give birth to ‘the new website.’  Since then (if this sounds like you), you’ve possibly tried to erase the memory, happy in the knowledge that ‘we have a new website’ and you’re content in the hope that there’s probably no need to think about it further. If this is you, then you might have a problem but the good news is it’s easy to fix.

Websites were once the domain of tech experts and marketing gurus who spoke an entirely different language to the rest of us. They were expensive and complicated and, once created, were so difficult to update that few bothered.

These days, however, business websites can be created by the layman, and it can all be done for minimal outlay. In fact, if you’re spending more than a few thousand on a website, I’d suggest you might be paying too much, especially if your main audience are other businesses as clients (consumers and shopping basket style websites have different features which are a bit more complex so they will cost a good bit more).  But to keep it low cost and effective, there are some things you need to keep foremost in mind.

The critical thing now, in my view, is that websites for businesses aren’t showcases with high pose value but a utilitarian component of your marketing mix which needs to work efficiently. To do that you need to understand how your clients use it, you should avoid clutter and complexity and you should feature the sorts of things that sets your business apart from others.

The truth is that people (clients are people too) will tend to use your website for just a few fairly simple things. The most common will probably be as a de-facto phone book. The trusty Google search is used to find your business website and through that your phone number or email address. Second, they’ll probably want to know about the people in your business. In professional services, it’s always the people that make the difference.  (I’m always amazed how often companies in this space hide their personnel from view). And third, a bit of a look at some of your recent work will probably satisfy most users that yes, you’re legit and you appear to have the people and track record you claim.

So if you’ve over engineered your website with a host of long narrative which covers everything from your early corporate beginnings to your community activity or long descriptions of your services, all written in that dismal language of corporate speak which sounds so much like everyone else’s, you’ve probably not only wasted your time but are wasting that of your clients. Rather than “You had me at hello” it’s a case of losing them from the start.

One of the first things you should start to do is measure your website performance. Have you even looked? It’s easy through Google analytics or other means to understand how often your site is being visited, how long people are spending looking at it, and what they’re using it for (ie which pages they’re looking at). If you haven’t measured how your site’s performing, I’ll give you my guess, which is that each visitor looks at on average between only 2 and 3 pages, they spend under 3 minutes on your site, and the most popular page is the one with your contact details. If you have pages and pages of content which aren’t even being looked at, think about getting rid of them. It’s cathartic and means you’ll have less content to maintain.

In my view, for most businesses much more than 5 or 10 pages in total and you begin to test the user’s patience. That doesn’t mean you can get away with five main tabs each with multiple pages attached, I’m talking 5 to 10 pages in total.  If your site has more than 10 pages, why not think about how it would work if you simply deleted the 5 least visited pages?

Now, have a look at your content. Look at the pages which are actually being visited. Check the narrative and make sure it’s as minimalist as it can possibly be. Have someone edit it for you if you can, with a brief to make the narrative as short as possible. Don’t be tempted to add but learn the discipline to delete. Less is definitely more. Instead of long narratives, are there visuals like graphs, diagrams or photos that will convey things for you?

And when it comes to content, try this: imagine replacing your company name with a rival’s. If the result sounds very much like what’s on a rival’s website, you’ve fallen into the trap of sounding like everyone else. Tourism marketing is a classic example of this. Words and phrases and even entire paragraphs that are almost entirely transferrable to rival businesses in different locations are a sign that there’s been little genuine effort to write for the reader. Delete it all and start again.

If you are a professional services firm, check how many of your professional staff are highlighted. In my view, websites should be updated as new staff join, existing staff are promoted or when people leave, just as your internal documents are. It should be quick and routine. The people you have are what set your business apart from competitors. Logos mean much less, I’m afraid, so if your focus is all about the ‘corporate look’ and logo land, and ignores or downplays the role of your people, you are making a mistake. And don’t fall for the trap of only highlighting senior staff. On a day to day basis, junior and middle ranking professionals have just as much contact with your clients as you. All you need is a nice photo and brief description. It’s not that hard.

On that score, I can’t say I’m a fan of the ‘corporate photo’ look which is highly staged and formal. Candid business casual is a bit more ‘real.’ And if you have on your website any of those stock corporate photos which pretend that your staff are a mix of Hispanic, Negro, Chinese and white Americans, all holding hands or in some obviously staged corporate scene, please please, please, get rid of them. Try this rule: use no pictures of people who don’t actually work for you. I’d rather see a pic of your pet dog that guards the office door than one of these stock images.

Your recent projects or assignments are also useful to highlight, but the operative word is ‘highlight’. You don’t need to provide volumes of information – a photo, illustration, chart or diagram with a few brief words will do the trick.

Currency is also important. The content should be up to date – not just personnel but all the content. Check to see how long it’s been since you did your own content refresh. If it’s more than 12 months, you’re overdue for a rewrite. There’s nothing worse, for example, than a ‘news’ section where the most recent update is more than a year old. It really looks like you’ve either done nothing in the last year, or have forgotten entirely about what’s on your site.

And finally, the easiest thing to find on your site should be your contact details. The office address, some contact emails, phone numbers etc. Why is it that this basic and most popular content is so often the hardest to find, or isn’t provided at all? If all you have for people to ‘contact us’ is one of those ghastly electronic contact forms and nothing else, I just ask why you even wanted a web presence in the first place? Hiding contact details and forcing people to use one of these contact forms is the web equivalent of a business that only gives out a call centre number with a hold message that says “your call is important to us” when you know damn well it isn’t.

Now, if all this web weight reduction sounds too depressing and you really can’t bear to be so minimalist, you can always provide longer documents via a pdf download. This way, anyone who’s interested in knowing a good deal more detail is catered for. And you can also count the number of people who download those documents, which could be a nice reality check.

Finally, a quick plug for some of the existing on-line web design outfits. I used one called wix.com to build mine – it was easy and low cost and even allowed me a few fancy features. There are others too, and many offer a variety of templates which make the exercise easier still. It’s actually become a relatively easy exercise these days and the only complexity is what you bring to it, so you only have yourself to blame.