Gone are the days where business is done purely by word of mouth. Almost anyone with a business, more than a year old, will have a website. And it’s a key part of expanding your customer base.
The most important thing you will get out of having a good site is increasing your customers. The more people know about you and your services/products, the more people there are to buy them from you. Which will eventually also make you more successful.
And if that hasn’t sold you, I don’t know what will.
The difference between having a website and a good website
But it’s not just about having any old site just to say you have one. You need a good one. Your site should be:
- Easy to navigate – people should be able to move around your website in a logical way. If someone has to click through eight pages just to get to what they want, they’re not going to be as keen to use your site as they would if it took three clicks. In a world of accessibility, people need to be able to get to what they want quickly.
- Nice to look at – Have you ever gone to a website and it looks old and there’s all different fonts, sizes and colours of text, and the text is flashing, and it looks a mess? I bet you have, and I bet you clicked straight off and found a different website to use. It doesn’t matter how valuable your information/ services/ products are, if your website isn’t something someone wants to look they’re gone. A clean professional looking website will keep people on it longer and make them want to come back.
- A good balance between text and images/video – Remember when you were in school or university and you had pages and pages of text to read, it was boring, daunting and you didn’t want to read it. Well, that’s exactly how people will feel if your website is very text heavy. There are lots of free, good quality stock images around these days that you can use to break up text on your website if you don’t have your own.
- Functional – If I’m on your website to buy something and it’s difficult for me to checkout, I’ll probably buy a similar product elsewhere. Your website needs to be functional for what your customers will use it for.
Why is a website important?
Having a good site, as we’ve said, will build your customer base, but it will also help you retain your customers too. Having a good experience with something will make you want to do it again.
Equally as important, having a site can help showcase what you do. Whether that’s providing a service like web design, selling products or even just information, your website is a great platform to do that. For instance, you might be here because we do web design, but from a quick scan of our website, you’ll now know that we do photography and SEO training, which you might not have known had you not come here.
A website is a great place for you to direct people for your contact information. From there they can contact you via the website itself, email or phone.
It’s a great place for you to showcase your personality too. People want to know who they’re buying from/ interacting with. And one of the easiest ways to show this is through your site. If you’ve got videos and photos, an about us page or a meet the team page, these are all great ways to show who you are. It’ll help you build trust with your customers and that will help keep them around.
A website can help you provide more information to customers. 4WD Supacentre do this very well. At the bottom of their product pages, there are often videos on how to use the products. Or, if you google the product, they have those videos available on YouTube (like this one). Whether you’re looking to buy something, or already have and need a reminder on how to set-up or use something, their videos give you that information. And it’s things like that that make you go back to a company to buy something.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is something that is used to help increase the traffic on your website with organic searches coming from the right people.
Without a website, you can’t use SEO to increase your traffic. And if you’re not increasing your traffic, you’re relying on word of mouth to build your business. Which absolutely works, it just takes time. But you can use less time and effort to gain more customers with SEO, only if you have a website.
There are lots of reasons to have a site, and even more to have a good one. If you don’t have a website yet, you might want to start thinking about building one. And if you need help, we’re always here.
Marcadet
Web Design Melbourne
