Your Website — What is the Value of Your Time?

Last month we talked about your marketing strategy and discussed the importance of your logo. Next, let’s discuss your website.

A Website is Your Online Marketing Presence

When someone asks me what my company does, I tell them that we create a marketing tool for your business. It just so happens to look like a website. It’s very important to know why you have a site. Is it to provide information about your business? Is it to sell products and services online through an ecommerce site? Is it engaging with your audience? Are you a membership based-organization and want to engage with your members?

Once you know what you want your site to do, it then needs to represent your USP (unique selling positioning) which sets you apart from your competition. When building your website, it’s important to make certain your USP is front and center and above the scroll of the site. Make certain to include testimonials on your homepage as well as a variety of ways people can contact you. Make certain that the information on your site is unique to you. What I mean by that is, don’t copy information from another site and paste it into your site. When we discover websites where information has been copied from another source, we are quick to point out how this affects their positioning on the internet and how search engines, like Google, will actually penalize you for copying the information.

When building your website, you worry about the look of it, but what about all the other elements you need to be concerned about? You say, “What other elements?” Well, if you are recreating your website to replace your current website: Are there going to be new pages to replicate the pages on the current website? Are you going from html to php? If you aren’t careful enough to let the search engines know about these changes, you can easily tumble down in your current position with Google. It’s like this, you’ve finished building your website. You’re ready. But are you? Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo, and all those search engines have a history of your old site. They have no clue you built a website. So, it’s important to let them know the changes. Why take chances to be found when you can make sure your website properly registered so it WILL be found.

So many questions to answer and some that make absolutely no sense. Just one more question to ask yourself — does it make sense for me to try one of those DIY, or choose a professional who will be able to create your website in a professional, timely basis? I’m sure you’ve seen those sites where they make it look so easy to build your own website. With all those websites showing you how easy it is to create a website, it never fails to surprise me how many people come in and say, “I tried that DIY site and just can’t do it.” Allow me to ask you one more question: Does it make sense to take your valuable time to build your own site, or does it make sense to devote your time to what you do best and allow a professional company to build your site. When you are drawn into building your website, it is taking you away from your own livelihood.

Alyse Mitten and her team at Interlace Communications have helped hundreds of business owners from solopreneurs, franchise owners, nonprofit organizations, ecommerce owners, and mid-size businesses to build their online marketing presence. They pride themselves in a unique program for search engine optimization that helps their websites to be found. Should you be interested in website design, search engine optimization, and website management, give them a call at 484.709.6564 or visit their website at iciconnect.com.

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