Does your website connect or hinder your business

With the first barrier being that most local businesses realise that they need a website the second barrier is for them to come to terms with the fact that they don’t need just any old website.

It is true to say that businesses today need some sort of web presence, however, they do need to be careful as to how this is interpreted, if the presence is something atrocious, it’s far better not to have a web presence at all – the reason being “First Impressions Count”.

How, where or who you get your website from is, of course, a choice which anyone is free to make, but be careful of friends and colleagues having a dabble whilst they’re finishing a course on web design you might see it as both you and them doing a favour for each other – the reality is that you could be doing each other harm, providing false hope on one hand in what they produce being fit for the purpose when it is not, and on the other hand causing your business harm with a half baked website.

There’s so much out there now for businesses to be able to have a website it’s just a simple matter of not going for just any old thing.

For a website, you have to find the right mix in both how it looks and how it operates – for instance, there are tools and sites out there on the internet which allow businesses to create a free website but perhaps a problem with utilising this route is that people viewing the finished site know it’s free.

This can go against the grain if it’s looking to charge for products and services as the immediate perception could be that they are of poor quality or be like the site and should cost next to nothing – to clarify if the website is cheap is the goods and services?

You’ll find websites out there which look great with nice designs pretty colours and a lot of imagery. The stark fact here could be that this type of website may have no substance behind it – only just looking the part, and being of no real use in search engine optimisation.

Other websites out there may not look good at all, as they are built in such a way that the search engines love them, but visitors to this type of site may not revisit because they don’t like the look of it.

Usually, you’ll find that nice-looking websites are built by web designers who have an eye for detail and may not be very web development savvy – and the technical better-built websites are done by web developers many of whom don’t have a creative bone in their body.

When you have a website whether it’s good or bad, keep in mind that it’s easy to check and validate what’s said about the business. For instance, if you say that you have 5,000 members to your website and it's built in such a way that each has a profile page chances are if built correctly by doing a simple online check on Google you’d expect to see at least the same or somewhere near that amount of pages/links indexed i.e. 5,000.

Likewise saying that so many visitors visit your site every month can be checked, for example, saying that x amount of them are unique visitors can be checked, and how your site ranks in search engines can be checked – the point here is you need to be careful what you say about it and how your site performs online, as this can be checked.

This blog started from us browsing through LinkedIn this morning after accepting a connection invitation, and we started to look at the other people in ‘the people you may know’ results.

One result came up with a West Midlands-based web development business that also specialises in SEO work, whose work summary and experience seemed to stand them in good stead having in the past worked for numerous large corporate-styled businesses.

Now we don’t know these people from Adam but when we first viewed their site in an IE browser it was all disjointed with things being out of position, yet when we then viewed it in a Firefox browser the site looked and operated fine.

The question here is how should we interpret the first thing we saw - as seeing that all things web is their bag, is it just a glitch? Is it a lack of attention? Or is it that they can’t do what they say they can do?

In part, it’s all down to how the site visitors feel at the time which has a direct result on how they interpret at that time, which is why first impressions count.