Let's face it, a good quality website is no longer an optional extra for businesses who are looking to succeed in the global (or local) economy. These days, internet users are increasingly savvy and have very high expectations when it comes to their online interactions. It is no longer good enough to maintain a static page with your contact details, a brief description of your company and a fuzzy picture of your shop front.
There are two really important reasons to have a great website:
1. To appease the mysterious search engine bots
OK, so search engine bots aren't really all that mysterious, but you do need to work at pleasing them. Search engine bots crawl through the content on your website in order to optimise your ranking on search engines, and are looking at four things: content, performance, authority and user-experience.
Think of them as the gatekeepers to the hippest nightclub in town. Everyone wants to get in to the club so there's a massive line up, but no-one wants to be among the nobodies at the back of the line. To get bumped up in the queue you need to appease the door bots, and in order to do that you need to look good, act cool and say the right things. The right content can optimise your ranking.
SEO is all about improving your site's visibility in organic (non paid) search engine results, and a professionally designed site is guaranteed to have all the necessary technical and creative elements you need to boost your rankings and drive more traffic your way. It really is one of those aspects of website design that is best outsourced to the experts.
2. To ensure that it's user-friendly and useful to people
If your website is slow to load, hard to navigate, badly designed or poorly formatted you can expect to lose people within a minute of landing on your home page. Each person who gives up trying to use your website represents a potential loss of revenue, but this can easily be prevented by ensuring that your online presence is user-friendly.
Good websites are easy to read, easy to navigate and have relevant content that is regularly updated. It's also vital to keep up to date with new technology and software changes, and this is where your relationship with a professional web developer will be worth its weight in gold.
Your website is a virtual shopfront that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The beauty of the internet is that is enables your customers to connect with your business at any time of the day or night, and with a mobile responsive website you are literally only a click and a swipe away from your customers.
People are using your website to make their purchasing decisions in the large majority of cases, but the flip side is that they are also doing the same via your competitors' sites. Can you afford to lose out to other businesses, simply because they have a better website than you?
