Is your website costing you customers?

When was your website last updated? Is the content still relevant? More importantly, ARE YOU BEING FOUND?

We talked of the problem at the PODI event. All the world’s highest-growth printers have a smart, interactive website. Often a full shopping cart or web2print facility. But, more importantly, their sites are very regularly updated and are a rich informational resource for their clients.

If You Run a Business, Static Websites are Dangerous

Unfortunately most printers websites are static and boring, perhaps only altered every few months or years. They give little reason for existing or new clients to visit. All about the company, its services, people and equipment. Perhaps a request-a-quote form. This is a dangerous strategy if you’re looking for new clients.

Why? Because when people are looking for a new print service provider, most go to Google. The way Google works, static sites rapidly disappear off their index and radar. Meaning it’s much harder for prospects to find you when searching for a new print provider. The best long term strategy to a higher search listing is to have a site that’s not an annual report, but much more like a weekly newspaper. Have new, interesting items added each week or month and also have others link to, or recommend you.

You need to improve your sites marketing effectiveness.  Here’s a free tool to help:

Find out your sites marketing effectiveness at www.websitegrader.com

Monitoring your sites grade allows you to check how it performs from a marketing perspective. It provides an independent assessment, away from the hype your web designer provides and will defend. Websitegrader gives clues as to what’s going wrong and reasons you’re not getting the traffic you deserve. A score of 80+ is the goal.

The problem though is that a low grade cannot be resolved by the average web designer since it’s not related to the ‘look’ or layout of the site. In fact for those who have highly creative ‘flash-based’ sites, the score will be particularly bad. It’s all to do with it’s underlying structure and SEO issues. I use websitegrader as a tool to give me a list of what needs to be done. A high grade generally comes after 6-12 months. There’s never a quick fix. It’s not just re-making your site. It’s ensuring you’ve other people and respectable sites linking back to you, which is work well outside what a typical ‘web designer’ wants to do!

However instead of overhauling an old site which can be costly, the easiest, best way to get an improved grade and more traffic is to migrate to superior blog technology like WordPress. Google tends to ‘like’ blog sites, not just because they get updated more often, but the WordPress backend structure is generally much cleaner, more ‘industry-compliant’. It also ‘tells’ Google every time you add new content. It’s not content with waiting for Googles robots to visit, as is the case with ‘normal’ websites.

All this means that a blog site, on average, gets 55% more traffic than traditional web design with SEO included, building static pages using Adobe Dreamweaver, MS Expressions etc.

WordPress now powers almost 10% of the web, and is used on over 26 million sites. Even Microsoft is dropping it’s own live spaces blog platform and teaming up with WordPress (read more). They are not only relatively inexpensive to setup, but for the site owners, they’re incredibly easy to update and manage.

Site Updates Made Easy

Once established, WordPress technology means when it comes to adding or changing content, there’s no need to talk to the web designer or developer at all – Just open up software like Livewriter, or accessing the site’s backend using your browser, and you’ve new content, including images, videos etc added in minutes. There’s even Blackberry and iPhone app that allows site editing on-the-go.

A Threat or Opportunity for Web Designers?

Basically, if you’re building a new website and NOT USING a WordPress infrastructure, it’s probably costing you traffic and sales. It’s sad that many old-school web designers see all this as a threat, not an opportunity. Most are focused upon building a ‘nice page’, not giving away content control or ‘engaging customers’. A few are starting to use this platform, but unfortunately they’re in the minority, at least in NZ.

And to prove these wordpress-based sites can look good, checkout some superb design templates at www.studiopress.com who is my favourite WordPress ‘theme’ builder. They provided the core theme that we then fine tune to suit individual market or company requirements. A Studiopress magazine theme runs this printnet site and dozens of others we’ve built.

So, if you’re looking for a printers website that’s guaranteed to get more traffic and sales (and a high, 80+ grade within a year), talk to us. Our own score is 85, the second-highest within the print sector. The highest, 90, belongs to one of my clients who started at a lowly 6 score two years ago…

We’ve been building amazing WordPress sites for many years, with packages starting from just $1,800. Even e-commerce websites from just $5,000. More importantly, we ensure your site get noticed and include some special, little-known sales management enhancements needed to succeed in this industry.

email zn.oc.tentnirpnull@nivek