“Ugh. He won’t listen to me. He does whatever he wants. Half the time he won’t answer my emails. He designed my site in a difficult platform – that means I can’t update it myself. I want to change some things around for marketing it better, but I’ve now been waiting for over a month and he doesn’t seem to understand what I want. He charges way too much money, and I’m just tired of fighting.”
Sound familiar?
We hear stories like that all the time.
Chances are you’re running into all these problems (and more) for one very good reason:
Your designer codes; he doesn’t understand marketing.
Your designer is a tech person – he cares about how it looks, how it’s designed, and how it functions. He likes showing off his skills with the “bells and whistles”. He wants to be able to give you all the things that will make you say WOW when you first see it. His talents lie in the looks and the feel. And that’s where his talents end.
The problem lies in the fact that your clients don’t care in any way about those bells and whistles. The first two seconds of load time might make them say WOW. But the second after that, its time for business. They look for what brought them to your site in the first place. They look for the content that will help them better trust you. They look for ease of use. And if two seconds of WOW is all they see and they can’t find what they truly want, they will head to another site – a more user-friendly site – that can get them what they want.
Marketing is what matters. And most web designers simply don’t understand that.
So you get what they want to deliver. And you wind up being ever-increasingly frustrated.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If you see yourself in the above story, let this be your wakeup call. Today is the day to update your site.
Here are a few more ways to know when your website needs updating:
You don’t have easy control over your site. With the easy platforms on the marketplace today, no small business owner should be held hostage by their web designer. If you can’t make changes easily to your site, its time for a new site.
You can’t see your site in a user friendly manner on your smart phone or tablet. Increasingly people are moving from desktops and laptops to tablets and phones for their everyday needs. If they can’t view your site, they can’t do business with you.
You haven’t made a change to your site in months. The only thing that keeps a site relevant is up to date content. If you don’t have an easy way to add content, change your site today.
Are there features and functions you no longer use? Nothing says “old” like a page that hasn’t been updated in months (or even years).
Does your site take a long time to load? Yes, we’re talking seconds here, not minutes. (If its minutes, you need a new site TODAY.) Look at it from your visitors’ perspective. Would you wait around for a site that takes a long time to load? Or would you back out and find another site to look at for information?
Are visitors moving from one page to the next? If you don’t have things like Google Analytics in place to tell what your visitors are doing, you have no way of knowing the path they are taking once they come to your site. The only way to make sure you have relevant content is to view how they move from one page to the next. If you aren’t getting traction, it is your website design’s fault.
When was the last time you updated your site? This is your marketing. This is the way you expect to attract clients. You can’t leave your main marketing tool untouched and without change for months or years. It should be something you change and tweak over and over again.
Do the search engines even know you exist? When you read SEO, if your first response is “huh?”, its time to get busy and work with your site. SEO doesn’t just happen; it takes work to get results in the search engines.
Ready to make a change? Start with a WordPress blog. You can have a customized design and have access to add/change anything you choose 24/7. It really is the easiest way to gain control over your marketing.