Isn't it strange? We imagine websites are an easy process, they will pull in many customers, get onto the first page of Google, and make our business a roaring success.
Websites can be a means to an end. Sometimes they exist only for compliance purposes, other times, their business vertical means they will never get significant traffic - yet, your potential customer expects a website to exist.
Many times, it is vital a website is top of the search rankings to draw in customers.
Customers are told that websites are cheap to implement, and yet the technology is multi-layered and complex.
This article gives everybody some thinking points about not only commissioning a website, but the amount of work needed by the client to make the website a success.
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Remember, don't set up Social Media accounts just for the sake of it - but do try to find all appropriate accounts to avoid disappointment. Perhaps you are not a Social Media guru, but you have one within your company.
We have a LinkedIn page, a Twitter account, a Telegram account, in addition to our website. We share content on technology blog websites. The key aim of being on Social Media is to increase brand awareness and provide additional ways for your audience to interact with you. It is not just to be there. Indeed, maintaining multiple accounts can be a burden.
It is our focus to consider how we are trying to connect with our audience and through what medium.
Look at your competitor's websites, do search engine searches to see what works in terms of content. Look at competitor's social media presence on different platforms, decide what works for you. Set up social media accounts on the platforms you think works but don't set up on every platform just because you think you should.
Whilst website traffic estimation can be inaccurate, still try to gauge how successful they are.
A question we ask - does competitor's websites actually make sense to those outside the industry? In technology, for example, we can find lots of industry jargon which makes zero sense to lay-people.
We write our content in Word/OneNote. We create a page per topic, and add extra information we feel is relevant. We write documents in word with our logos, and exporting them to pdf format for more in-depth content. We think in terms of smaller blocks of content, captions, headlines, calls to actions, links, images.
Writing web copy is a challenging thing to do. Giving it to a third party who doesn't understand your business vertical may not be the best approach. Giving your content to an SEO expert may make sense for SEO purposes but not commercially.
Whatever you decide to do, your content is an emergent activity - it takes many iterations. There will always be errors. Indeed, most large website platforms are littered with errors.
We source shutter-stock from royalty free and commercially permitted sources. Nothing stops you using your holiday photos but do research copyright. Our personal opinion for our website is not to include lots of staff profiles, but we may do a feature page. Your organisation may want to really focus on the team as part of the brand.
We think in terms of 1200px wide, 800px wide, 500px wide. We don't think in terms of 10 megapixel images.
We ensure that each folder contains images of the same dimension. We are happy for you to give us your large images and you decide which ones you like.
The important thing is to ensure you have images in set sizes for different expected screen sizes. For our website, we created folders for sizes of; grid, stretched, jumbotron, large. We will help you to get this right.
It is probable our website has gone through at least 5 releases. For many years, we were focusing on a completely different business vertical - these things change. Only now does our website do our business and vision justice. We still find small improvements are needed. Indeed, what we find matters to us are often the opposite of what we originally thought.
There is no shame in using our Starter Website and deciding you have a completely different set of requirements in a year's time.
The owners of a company, releasing a new website will often ask friends and family for their opinion - we still do, it is natural. Please remember - your friends, family, and even colleagues are not your customers. You may need to ask industry experts to take a look to get their opinions. Even experts' opinions should be put into perspective. A common example, when we ask ten people if they like a web page, one person will say something needs changing, once we re-release the altered page, another person says to restore it to how it used to look.
Info Rhino is not expecting millions of hits a day and hundreds of thousands of customers. Some clients may expect this. What is important is there is clear data and analytics on your business with insights into how things are going. Our expertise is in data analytics - Business Intelligence gives means we can help you think about these things. The goal is to think through and evaluate what works. We can do this through our https://www.inforhino.co.uk/services/advisory-solutions service.
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