So I’ve been sick the past few weeks, it’s been a particularly strong flu, so I’v had to take a break and my wife, God bless her, has been doing an amazing job managing the 3 kids AND a sick husband. It’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to her, she’s committed. And you know what? that adds to her already gorgeous looks.

Websites, and things in general, are the same as well. There’s more to them than meets the eye and after a few seconds on a site or with a product, people will have an opinion of it. Only part of that opinion will be based on how a site or thing actually looks, and that’s what most people associate with design, how things look.

But design goes much deeper than that. The brunt of your site visitor’s opinion will be based on the usefulness and ease of finding the right information at the right time. So if you’re selling a product, some information that would be useful to display with that product would be price, specifications and reviews. If you’re selling a service, a few things you might want to include are what the service provides, how it benefits the buyer and how to initiate the service i.e. online booking form, phone call etc.

So even if your site or product isn’t the prettiest on the block, if it’s useful, people will keep using it and keep coming back to it.

A lot of the developers/freelancers I follow on twitter and whatnot all do a good job at what they do. And more often than not, they give away their secrets to those paying attention.

I was going to worry about giving away secrets, but then I realised if that was the case, then I shouldn’t write at all, and I didn’t need yet another excuse not to write. And one of things that drove this home was an article I was reading about some amazing hermit programmers in the early 80’s who were pioneers.

When a young programmer actually met one these hermits at a conference, he mentioned he may have given away a large portion of his graphics engine. Upon hearing this, the hermit said “A good cookbook doesn’t make a chef”.

So yes, everything I do for & with websites can easily be found online. And I want to contribute to that noise, I need to, as a way of giving back to the community that I’ve learned so much from.

But my clients have better things to do, they have businesses to run and products to deliver and deadlines to meet. They have assets to manage, ROI to measure and next year’s projects to plan.

So I’m not afraid to give away the farm. Where I live, there’s plenty of them anyway.

Put your website to work – Email

And when I say email, I mean to collect emails, but it’s easier said than done.

Why on earth would a visitor to your site give their email to you? What’s in it for them?

That answer will vary depending on your business and marketing strategy, but in essence, you’ll be giving away something. Here’s a few examples:

– pdf case study
– notifications of special sales
– special deals only for email subscribers
– access to tutorial video(s) or content
– a 5 part email series going in-depth on a topic
– etc.

The hardest part about this is the strategy forethought and setting up the content to be given away. After that, you’re on the home stretch.

And if you’re reading this circa August 2015, you’ll notice that I, myself, have not taken my own advice here and I would bow my head in shame. But I have been brainstorming, and my goal is to get it live on this site before the end of the year.

I’ll tell you my plan too, it’s to setup an email drip campaign of between 5 to 10 emails (1 a week), that will be aimed at SMB’s and deliver to them different strategies on how to put their website to work.

Would you sign up for something like this? let me know in the comments below or just email me and tell me your thoughts.

They say change is inevitable and that’s exactly what’s happening on the web, everyday, the one constant. Design trends, software updates, hardware updates, platform updates, you can’t avoid it.

This can be hard for businesses who just want something setup once, but the fact of the matter is, the web is here to stay and your budget needs to account for that these days. Whether that’s a new website every 3–5 years, or a monthly retainer you pay for web services, or some other service, your business needs to have the web covered.

For a lot of small, local businesses who don’t have a large web budget, I’d recommend just one page of a website where you’d display your service(s), what makes you special, and then your contact details and hours of operation, simple as that. This gives all the pertinent information to those landing there without having to click around.

For those businesses wanting their websites to be more than just a pretty face, it’s time to start to looking at your website as an employee. I call this putting your website to work.

The work your website does will vary depending on your type of business but in the end, it’s meant to create/qualify leads and deliver more warm leads to your doorstep or phone.

I’ll list out a few ways in which you can put your website to work for you and I’ll cover them more in depth in subsequent articles.

Ideas for putting your website to work

• Set up an email drip campaign worth signing up for
• Publishing tutorial articles and/or videos on your site
• Email sales notifications
• Book appointments online
• Take orders online
• Setup a membership service

There’s more, but this will give enough to go for the next few weeks as we’ll look at each one more in depth to see what it could look like for your business.

Your Website is not for You

You heard me. Your website is not for you. It’s for your customers.

In my last article, I said I would start to go over some strategies on how to put your business website to work and the foundation of that needs to start at the above thought. It’s so obvious, and yet many sites miss the mark.

I was recently watching an episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Hotel Hell, and in this particular hotel, when first checking in, you would have to sign a waiver saying you were responsible for any damage to the walls, apparently the owner liked the finish. But in the owner’s attempt to protect their investment, it put a foul taste in the patron’s mood, which severely affected their desire to return.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, your website is like the hotel. It needs to be designed with the end user not just ‘in mind’ but at the very core of why you’re building the site. Listen to your customers, and you will have a business that succeeds.

In closing I’ll say it again, your website is for your customers.

Another way to say it, “The web is real.” Too many individuals I’ve talked to and passing conversations I’ve had, left me puzzled and a little offended. Reason being, the view these people had was that websites just appear out of nowhere, thus there’s no real value to them, furthermore, any web work is not ‘real’ work or ‘real hard’ work.

Needless to say, I was unimpressed.

In the direct conversation I had, I chided the person, explaining that the web is very sophisticated and any work with websites is very technical in nature and that websites do not appear out of thin air with little work involved. All that probably fell on deaf ears, but I’m not too worried because this person will never be a client of mine. What did worry me were the agreeing nods to this person’s point of view.

Ignorance might be bliss, but only for the ignorant.

So why am I writing all this for you today? Because I want to bring you and your business into the light that is the modern web. It is real, it is tangible, it is worth investing in and no, I don’t mean buying stocks in APPL, I mean it’s worth investing your money in a solid web strategy that I guarantee will be one of the pillars of your business in the next 3 to 5 years if not sooner.

So, do you have a strategy for your website?

If not, no worries because in the next few posts, I’ll go over some different strategies for business websites, so stay tuned.

Here it goes: consistency. Of all the things I’ve read and continue to read about SEO, consistency is the thread that is common to all strategies. But I’ve already failed, I’ve missed taking my own medicine, or at least I missed it last week (i.e. publishing an article). But here I am this week.

And that’s ok, for now. Right now, my goal is to get the discipline within my routine to sit down and write once a week. And that’s a big enough job seeing as I don’t consider myself a writer, and I’ve got other fires to put out. But in publishing weekly, when visitors do come to my site (please come), they get fresh content and I believe visitors can sense fresh content.

I live in what I consider to be a small town in Northern NSW, Australia and for all its shortcomings, it has some of the best fresh food. The town is rife with fresh/locally roasted coffees, fresh sour dough breads and on Friday evenings, you can get some of the best wood-fired pizza baked by a real Italian.

So, be consistent, stay fresh.

A famous play-write once wrote, “What’s in a name?”, and as much as I agree with the logic that followed, ‘consultant’ is not my name, it’s my title.

In my opinion

And there’s a fairly simple reason I chose that title instead of the plethora of others: the title ‘Consultant’ (should) convey that I have an opinion. I am not a magic microphone you dictate your design decisions to and I code them into a website verbatim. I’m a professional who understands multiple facets of the web i.e. design, development, content management & strategy and the technologies required to bring all those together.

Tell me more

‘Consultant’ also brings with it a sense that I listen to my clients as they explain to me what they hope to achieve through their website and then sit back as I explain some ways to get there. To me, each project is unique, even if it is another ecommerce/digital download/membership site, and those clients often operate in different markets, thus their site needs to account for that difference.

I’m sure in future articles I will go into more detail, but that’s where I’ll leave it today, my top 2 reasons for choosing the title ‘Consultant’.