Do you have an organisation website? I am sure you do because everyone else does. Back in the mid 1990’s any organisation worth their salt decided to build a corporate brochure on the internet because everyone else was doing the same, hence the inevitable rise of the digital design agency. These old websites lacked any focused purpose and all too often were a mix of ubiquitous marketing messages that addressed nothing and no one in particular. Many organisations were stung with huge design costs for what were in truth rather lacklustre web brochures based on old marketing principles that were inordinately difficult for the frustrated organisation to manage alone.
That was the case back in 1997 so
where do we find ourselves today? For many organisations unbelievably they find
themselves in pretty much the same place as 15 years ago. Rather than
commoditizing websites so that they are now highly professional and yet easy to
manage and update, you only need to invest an hour of your time to run round
the international partner internet ecosystem to see that things are very far
from being okay.
This article summarizes ten
primary reasons why so many organisational websites fail to impress, achieve
their aims or sell the services of their owners. Whilst this article is aimed
at the technology partner, many of the elements listed here can easily be
applied to any organisational website to help you determine whether you are
really on track with your web strategy.
“You will reap what you sow” says
the old adage and this is certainly true of websites. If you put in little
effort in terms of design, focus and content you will get little back. There
are literally millions of websites that remain devoid of visitors and yet to
the innocent eye, look great. There are
no short cuts to a rich and engaging website that fully represents your brand
and reflects your full value proposition. Why then is it the case that so many websites
are treated as if they are secondary issues with underwhelming budget and lack
of business engagement?
Great websites do not need to
cost tens of thousands of dollars to create and most of the websites I have
created which have generated as much as 1.25 million visitors per month have
actually cost very little in $ terms. What websites do require however is time and
effort in terms of content creation and tuning, messaging, audience
understanding and search engine strategy. These are things that do not happen
overnight and are generally iterative.
Looking at a multitude of current
technical organisation websites it is simply staggering how bad many of them
are and how little investment they have gained considering the task that is
being asked of them – to represent an entire organisation and its primary value
propositions to a global audience of viewers. Far too many websites rely almost
purely on an identity of original logo and brand colour scheme without any
further thought or strategy. What is most often missing is up to date, fresh
content, original and varied material and original thought. To a degree then
this is why they offer little value to the visitor and simply a little
investment in time and effort addressing the other points in this article would
help enormously..
Brochureware websites are all too
often built to tell the world that you exist, that you are here and that you
have a website! To be blunt: so what? If the website isn’t offering something
of specific and immediate value then do not be surprised if people exist after
just a few seconds, never to return. Your value proposition should be clearly presented
on the front page, immediately obvious and with a clear message or call to
action.
You must first set out exactly
what you aim the website to achieve and then design it to underpin this or
these objectives. If the website does not have a specific purpose then ask
yourself what it is really there to achieve.
Let’s go back to basics, what are
you selling and why are you selling it and what makes this thing or these things
so different from your competitors and why should anyone really come to you?
Maybe the fact that you are based in DC is the main thing or that you have a
market differentiator that can’t be found anywhere else or that you have a
packaged business solution that really does make a lot of sense to certain
organisations.
Have you made the value
proposition clear in the opening statement on the opening page. Have you
cleared out the cluttered jargon and techno speak and useless logos and mapped
out what it is you are offering and why? If you haven’t then your website just
may be falling at the first hurdle.
Far too many websites try to be
all things to all people or worse nothing to anyone in particular whilst no
specific audience has been determined. It is perhaps rather harsh to suggest
that many organisational websites primarily serve the ego of the executive officers
of the company who commission these sites but it is certainly evidently the
case that far too many websites read like CEO/Partner Owner resumes and celebrations
of historical success.
An effective website should be
built with a specific audience in mind to achieve a specific call to action. If
a website exists to sell specific services then the site should aim to get
people to pick up the phone and call to make a pre-sales appointment. If a
website is selling a product then the site needs to offer a free trial or demo
or other content that underlines the process of product sale.
If a website offers nothing more
than general information with no call to action then why have the website at
all? Included in this point is the speech being used to talk, otherwise known
as the language of the website: Just cast your eye around the internet at tech
firms and take a look at the phraseology in use by the majority of firms: “enterprise
social”, “trusted advisor” and the plethora of single statements supposedly designed
to inspire “the business of the future is today”. No one talks like that in
real life so why put it on your website?! Instead think about matching the language of
your website to the audience of your website.
Does your website work seamlessly
by expanding on a 36 inch monitor and resolving on a smartphone or tablet? Or
does your website simply work on your own laptop? Have you ever tested your
website properly on multiple portable devices or are you hoping future
potential customers will do that for you?
It comes as no surprise that over
70% of current organisational websites will not render correctly on mobile
phones and yet we are seeing the largest drop in PC purchasing ever as they are
replaced by portable devices so who is missing the point here?
If your website will not work
whilst a potential customer views it on a train, in the airport or in the back
of a cab then can you blame them for not coming back?
“Build it and they will come”
states another adage rather optimistically; we all know this does not work. You
can put a huge amount of effort into building a website but if no one can find
it then what is the point of its existence? Whilst back in 1997 SEO may have
been viewed as some form of black art, today there really is no excuse at all
as all the tricks and tactics for search engine optimization have been
extensively documented and are readily available and therefore require your
investment and attention.
SEO isn’t a one-off task and neither
is it within the normal skill range of your internal marketing team and may
require planning like a military exercise. However the basics of SEO are
extremely well known and easily followed and yet I would go as far as saying
that 85% of websites have little if any search engine strategy in situ from the
evidence of the websites visited recently.
Actually many tech partner websites
really are some of the most dull
websites you will ever visit which is why, when you look at your web stats you
may be surprised to find the majority of your visitors refused to stay. There
are fashions in website design and there are fashions in colour palettes (white
for example) as well as (fly out) menu design and page structures but being the
same as everyone else does not mean your website is original, refreshing and
full of inspiration.
When was the last time you
considered embedding video and audio, podcasts, blogs and animation or do you
think it is better to stick to flat images and some text headlines? Are you
using the very best collateral to appeal to the audience you determined in
point 3? Variety is the spice of life and you can apply that cliché to your
website to good effect.
It is a tough one but the reasons
why blogs are starting to dominate search engine results is because websites lack
engaging and useful content that is regularly refreshed. Of course one of the
ways to solve the issue is to add a blog to the website but I would suggest
that there is no reason why a website should not have plenty of fresh and rich
information and article pages that are regularly updated.
Go one further and build the
website using WordPress or similar so that it is in effect a blog at heart which
then allows easy addition of new news articles and items of interest. I visit
websites annually that fail to change one word year on year and most certainly
do not contain informative articles.
With the easy access to YouTube
there is also no reason why the website should not contain plenty of video
material that adds a layer of engagement and infotainment that is still largely
lacking in most sites today.
Whilst I mention content it is also amazing how core content on website pages is badly written, lacks spell-checking and is grammatically incorrect. It may not matter to you, but it may matter to someone looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars with you.
You know when you are being sold
to and so do I. Therefore it should come as a surprise that many websites continue
to be so unsophisticated, so overt if not clichéd in the way they overtly (over)sell
their messages with over-the-top statements, outlandish claims and corny
one-liners. Put simply, overt selling turns people off and audiences today are
far more sophisticated than web marketers give them credit for.
It is not good enough to say we
are the leading Office 365 partner, the number 1 Microsoft partner, the partner
of the year or the award-winning…these statements are only minor underscore of
a much larger value proposition and its sadly the larger value proposition that
is rarely stated in plain English and without marketing lingo.
Go and read the jaded comments
for YouTube video ads for an hour or two and digest how today’s jaded audiences
actually react to cheesy one-liners and audacious statements, you will find
plenty of thumbs down. If you allowed a bunch of tech savvy teenagers onto your
website would you gain many thumbs up or thumbs down, be serious. Objectivity
regarding web collateral is hard but you will do yourself a great favour if you
do use an objective focus group to assist you in removing the worst of your web
marketing sins.
Do you know why Contact Us
appears to the right hand side of the menu on most websites? Do you believe
people work across a website menu from left to right? Have you any evidence of
this yourself? Too many websites are designed using a painting-by-numbers
template formula whereby everything from the home page structure to the menu
wording is via a design that everyone chooses to employ.
What this really means is not that
people will find your website easy to access and use but that it looks just
like everyone else’s and therefore fails to distinguish and differentiate
itself in those first crucial seconds. More time needs to be spent at creating
a website structure that underpins your specific call to action rather than
whether it contains the same elements as found on other websites.
That’s it done, the website is
built so we will come back and visit it again in a few years. That is all too
often the problem with websites. In designing and building a website, it should
have metrics that can be measured and monitored and tuning of page design,
content, messaging and other elements to drive the call to action by the
visitors. If this is employed then there is a far greater chance that the
website is a valuable asset that underpins organisational growth rather than
being an expensive albatross round your neck. As with point 1 in this article,
investment is required and this means continuous investment by those who are
skilled in web design and strategy.
If you do not know what the website is specifically there to achieve and there is nothing measurable to check success criteria against then there is no way of knowing whether any investment in a website presence is required or is gaining a return.
If you do not know what the website is specifically there to achieve and there is nothing measurable to check success criteria against then there is no way of knowing whether any investment in a website presence is required or is gaining a return.
Conclusion
Of course, many organisations
have become side-tracked by building a social network presence, presence in Facebook
(cheap and fast), Linked-in (cheap and fast) together with other social outlets.
Whilst these certainly play a part in brand expansion, most user
information searches are still performed via the primary internet search
engines.Therefore whilst finding your website in search is critical, once found, if
your website fails any or many of the points featured above then your web presence may
achieve anything from maintaining the status quo to turning potential clients away. The task is to impress your visitors but you really need to check whether you are failing.
I am sure that some readers will
be reading this article feeling pretty pleased that the points raised surely cannot
apply to them as they have recently launched a brand new website with lots of
fresh new graphics and a glossy new look. I have only today viewed three newly launched websites from
technology companies that in fact fail on most of the points above. They look expensive but they fail to impress and I won't be back.
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