Wednesday 4 September 2013

WHAT IS YOUR DREAM WEBSITE?




It is almost every manager's wish that their product would make a hit and 100s of people would rush for it at one time. These days we all aspire for a global hit. Not having faith in our abilities, we try to ‘catch’ customers one by one and reduce our dreams.

I believe one of the tools to make this possible is through a website. It has so much potential. I know most people would dispute this claim because their websites or blogs have not brought them much returns.
When facing a bottleneck in your business think about a website; if you have one then improve it.
A website can promote your products to anywhere in the world. It can send your products to offices and homes that you would not be allowed into. Products are launched in Europe and we in Africa are aware of it the same day through websites. Formerly, it took months.

The world has become small through the function of the internet. Yet what makes the world converge are the websites on the internet. The website is as important as the links of the internet itself. Gradually, the world owns gadgets that are bringing all of us together. You can bring you customers together through your website. A website can be useful to any business.
They have become cheap so that every small business can own one. Look into the papers and you would notice that, some programmers write it for free and you just have to pay for the hosting fee. Any small business can own one be it barbering shop, food joint, sports pubs and so on.

Why our websites have failed to deliver
·       
       Old information; people never update information on their websites. I don’t have to visit it because I know what is there already.

·      Confused signals; too many things bundle together on a website. I visit some websites and am confused because I don’t know what they are for.


·         Hidden important features: you discover that the most important features of some websites are hidden and you have to struggle to find it.

·    Unadvertised features; so you hope that feature would deliver you some income but it is never used because, there is nothing on your website that point people to it.


·         No web-analytics; not using your websites analytical tool to know what pages are important to visitors. If you knew the pages that are important to your visitors you would enhance it properly, at least you would place ads where there where people can see.

·         Unanswered emails; when I make an enquiry and I see that it is not answered, I don’t waste my time visiting that website again. It is a dead site to me.


·         Null pages; it can be very annoying when you click a page and nothing shows up. This gives me a negative impression about that company.

·         Unattractive website; this make people surf another website because nothing attract them to stay there enough to see what you have for them; dull pictures, small font size and so on.

·         Slow website; some are designed so poorly that when you click, you can eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner and it’s still not opened! I know some websites that even when my link is bad I can still surf.

·         A website that is not marketed; if you don’t promote your website, how would people know it is there?


Positive Attitude that Deliver Results

·         Campaign; I believe a website should be a campaign site or have an agenda. It should have a purpose that is evident to the visitor the moment he or she starts clicking the pages.

·       Engaging features; you have to make sure you only place your most important features. People don’t spend too much time on websites these days.


·         Editable website; ask your website designer to make some place editable for you. Areas like placing adverts, creating email, accessing the web-analytics should be made available to you. when starting a small business you might not have enough money to employ somebody to manage your website for you and this can help.

·         Website designers aren’t marketers; Get a marketer to write your pages for you! A professional website writer would draw the programme that would make the website powerful enough generate traffic.

·         Your website should offer something that keep people coming back repeatedly. This way they would see the new things you have on the pages.

·         Be abreast with website information; what is search engine optimization? If you don’t know some of these things how can you tweak it to generate traffic?

·         Website research; surf other websites and note down points before having one written for you. Note the latest trends and always have your website updated to the best that it can be.

Your website can turn your business around, don’t forget that!


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Thanks for reading
Claus Otoo
Accra Ghana

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