Top 5 Reasons Why Your Website Stinks!

Typically the first step and often times the last one small business take when it comes to online marketing is a website.  Certainly you cannot do much without having a website in the way of internet marketing, but what is troublesome is how bad most of them are.  Often times products or services are exchanged for a website, or someone has a “cousin” who knows a friend that knows how to make a website. Though, sometimes small business owners just don’t have the money, time, or connections to meet up with the right company for the job.

Often times as we scour the web for local businesses, we are always wondering why the websites are so bad. Once we talk to these businesses and find out they paid several thousand dollars for their website—we really get mad.  That very fact has inspired this particular post about things a small business owner should keep in mind when it comes to designing their businesses website.

1. Get Multiple Quotes

Getting multiple quotes doesn’t just mean from several webmasters in your town, take the time, ask around and get quotes from national companies as well.  While in our opinion the best work comes from freelancers it can be very hard to find a reliable one.  For example we went through maybe 20 of them before finding our guy and now we use him every single day.

2. Have Lots of Helpful Content

One of the most common fears is “if I give them all this information they will just do it themselves.”  While sometimes that is true, most of the time if someone is a do-it-yourself type of person they would be a great customer anyway.  They may purchase some small items or services, but will typically be more trouble than they are worth.

In our experience, sharing information with potential clients or customers helps gain their trust and that is worth more than anything.  If your customers know you, like you and trust you, they will be more loyal than most anyone—they’ll come back again and again.  The best way to do this is with showing them how authoritative you are by sharing information.

3. Usability Is Very Important

Make sure your website is easy to navigate, what people are looking for has to be easy to find.  In many cases ourselves included people online have the attention span of a 3-year-old child.  You have to show them what they are looking for, tell them why they should use you, and complete the transaction whether it’s a physical sale, a phone call or an email.  Either way it isn’t easy.  You should ask people, friends and family to check it out and see what they think, it must at all costs be easy to navigate.

4. Have an Obvious Contact Option

This is perhaps the easiest and shortest point but you need to give your potential customers an easy way to contact you, have a contact form that is quick and easy to fill out to request more information and of course you will want to have a phone number to call whenever possible.  If you are not open 24-hours-a-day make sure you list the hours that you will be able to take the call.

5. Track EVERYTHING

Make sure you have Analytics installed (Google Analytics is Free) to track how many visitors are coming to your businesses website, the pages they like and the ones they don’t.  Just one quick example of how having analytics will help you.  There are two particular pieces of information that are pretty helpful, entrance page, this is the page they landing on of your website, it is most often your home page and exit page, this is the page they often leave from.

If you have a really high amount of people exiting a particular page you can assume they are not finding what they need there, or you need to take a look at the page and see why people are leaving.  For example, if it is a contact us page maybe it makes sense, but if its your pricing page—maybe you need to check your prices or possibly not list them.

Bottom Line

As you can see, there’s a lot to keep in mind when you’re a small business and hoping to maximize your return on investment for your website.  As a small business owner you will have to wear many hats, this will just be another one for most people.  Below is a list of what you should (roughly) expect to pay for a website.

•    Basic Website (custom design)- $2000-$3000
•    More Advanced Website (some ecommerce or blog applications)-$2500-$5000
•    Full E-commerce site (a full shop and buy here website with lots of products) $5000 +

This is just a guide to let you know what to expect. Can you get a website for $500.00?  Yes; however, you get what you pay for. Aside form giving you the lowdown on how to optimize your website without getting ripped off, we also what you to know what to expect when you’re ready to get your businesses website going.