Web Technologies
Making the web work for your business
Nearly all businesses have a website, some more sophisticated and advanced than others - irrespective of what stage of development a website is at, the simple fact remains that it is the most accessed and viewed representative of your business. It's your best salesperson, corporate evangelist, recruiter and marketer all rolled into one. With this in mind it's absolutely essential that you don't stop at simply having a 'well dressed shop window' but consider all the other areas of an effective website strategy.
The Key Components to a successful Website Strategy
Ensuring your brand and its values are successfully communicated through the website design is critical as this will enable you to stimulate and engage your target audience from the onset. The website will live or die by the experience a user has within the first 5 seconds of landing on the home page.
The website build provides the user with the architecture and navigation to find their way around the site. Again, this is crucial to ensuring your site is 'sticky' and intuitive to use. Internet users have little patience, so it's imperative to provide them with an immersive and engaging experience with little or no barrier to entry (unless for good reason).
Once you've managed to hook people into the website (between 5-30 seconds) then the actual content and copy of the site becomes important. Stale, dull, irrelevant or out of date content can be hugely damaging to both your brand and the user experience. Having the ability to drive fresh and new content quickly and easily through the site is a key factor, not only in retaining first time visitors, but also encouraging repeat visits. A good content management system allows non-technical people to quickly and easily add new or change existing content on the website. This helps to shortcut the lengthy and often costly process of having to work through an outside agency or via the internal I.T dept to update the website. The website is arguably the most important representation of your company and therefore, in most cases, it should be controlled and maintained by those people responsible for marketing the company - content management facilitates this.
So, you've got a website that's well designed, easily navigated and with relevant and current content - what next? Do you expect people to simply stumble across your website?
Many organisations will invest heavily in getting to this point but neglect the fundamentals of driving traffic to the website on a regular basis, and understanding how people are using the site once they're on it.
Driving People To Your Website
How do you generate traffic to your website? Firstly, Search Engine Optimisation plays a very important role. Ranking well in the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo) under key search terms that are relevant to your company's products and/or services will bring well qualified and interested visitors to your website. SEO (search engine optimisation) is a broad and deep subject in its own right and requires a multi-tiered approach in order to ensure success for your website. Purestone provide a fully managed SEO service which you can read more about by clicking on the following link: Search Engine Optimisation Managed Service.
One other major form of online marketing that enables you to drive consistent and targeted traffic to the website is e-marketing. Through e-newsletters, lead generation, online surveys and other email based campaigns you can build e-marketing into your website strategy as a highly effective website traffic generating tool. Purestone provide a number of e-marketing solutions, from a market leading e-marketing managed service to an e-marketing self service we can help you deliver a highly effective e-marketing strategy.
Understanding how people use your website
Understanding how people use the website will provide valuable insight and understanding that in turn can inform how you change and evolve the website. Website Analytics can be provided by software that interrogates, interprets and reports on all aspects of the user traffic that comes through the website.
Purestone provide a comprehensive website analytics managed service that includes initial setup of your website on a market leading analytics platform, monthly reporting, and regular meetings to discuss the information and plan changes to the website.
