Empowering Your Website

“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” says the old adage. But how about a website?  Does the same adage apply...and what does that adage really mean?  Here are three similar...but slightly different interpretations.

1)  Don't make judgments based only on appearances ... before you can judge something, you need to take a deeper, closer look at it.

2)  The value of something is not always obvious from what we see on the surface, so we should save our judgments until we have more experience.

3) When you have only seen the surface of something, you cannot know what is on the inside.

The reality is that, all too often, websites are judged as acceptable by website owners on the basis of their covers alone; primarily because

1) they aren’t aware of all the possibilities available to them;  

2) they may put what they want to say ahead of what visitors are seeking; and

3) they may be working with website designers who aren’t marketing-driven.

We're not suggesting that the website's cover...its design and appearance...are unimportant. They are very important. But following the spirit of the adage, we think that a truly successful, effective website, like a book, really does need to be judged by what is ON THE INSIDE and what is on the inside needs to be marketing-driven.

That means that CONTENT, FUNCTIONALITY, NAVIGATION, UTILITY and perhaps, CONTENT MANAGEMENT, are all just as important as colors, page design, pictures and graphics.

The reality is that web surfers turn to the web because they expect it to contain the latest information about whatever it might be that they're after. If a potential client or customer is met with a website that disappoints that inherent expectation, they are unlikely to stick around. Given the reality that a web presence is now a vital strategic marketing tool for any serious company, stagnant content on your website is quite simply an unacceptable business practice. You wouldn't run a TV or newspaper advertisement that featured sale dates from last year or information that is out-of-date. People would wonder why you wasted their time and your own money placing such an ineffective ad. A website, while economically more forgiving, is no less forgiving when it comes to consumer perceptions.

Further, your visitors won’t stick around if they find it difficult to move around your site, or can’t use it to do what they want to do. For this, you need a website designer and developer who understands that your website is a marketing tool that functions as an online salesperson, information center, order taker and customer service representative.

With prospects and customers, you want to put your best foot forward with your internet presence. Art-for-art’s sake, amateur, uninformed and discount web design just won’t cut it in today’s competitive world.

Keeping It Fresh with Content Management

Keeping it fresh can be complicated by the fact that many businesses may not have an internal web development staff member who can constantly be tweaking and keeping the website up-to-date. Furthermore, in the past web development has typically required a specialty skill set with a fairly complex knowledge of programming and a variety of other technological capabilities. It is because of this that most businesses turn to a web development company or individual to design and often maintain their website - an option that may be perceived as “costly.”

An Alternative

There is, however, a solution that alleviates the need to hire an internal web development employee, or pay outsourced developers to continuously update your website content. The solution comes from initially designing the website in a way that allows it to be updated from a self-managed, web-based administration tool. The design of this tool needs to be simple enough so that anyone with the most basic knowledge of a computer and an internet browser, can update all relevant content on the website from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Payback Scenarios

The payback on a web-based administration tool can begin once you establish the fact that you've got the wrong equipment (website) in place - and that equipment needs to be ripped out, and replaced with more efficient, less costly equipment. The up-front cost of deploying a website designed in a way that enables in-house administrators to maintain it in the future is a more costly endeavor initially than designing a stagnant site that will require costly developer-intensive updates down the road.

The reasons for this are quite simple. It takes more thought and initial work to develop a web-product of this caliber. But the lifetime of the site will be greatly extended by this approach. More importantly, the long-term costs of this approach are dramatically less than the standard developer-maintained model now widely being employed by small to mid-size companies. Those are the two key factors to bear in mind.

The End of Developers?

We can’t go quite that far. There's a good chance that a developer will needed to fix a feature that may not be working as intended or as well as one might like. Further, now that they know what their website can do, clients often begin to ask for more and more features to extend the functionality of their already powerful back-end management tool.

The excitement over at last gaining control over one's own website is nearly universal.

From a practical perspective, a client may want to start out having the developer design the site in a way that enables them to self-manage all the text-only content. From there, the client may want to extend that capability to generating custom reports, or creating image galleries from a point and click interface - and on and on.

Every case is unique, and that's the way it ought to be. The sky truly is the limit. So, while many would like to see the websites run themselves, there will always be a need for a developer.

The important thing to remember is that an empowered website is an empowered tool that empowers you!

Tower Marketing is a central Pennsylvania advertising agency and web design firm specializing in traditional and interactive advertising, graphic design and marketing while providing services to clients in Lancaster, Reading, Harrisburg, York and Lebanon, as well as Philadelphia and its surrounding counties in the Delaware Valley and Tri-State area.

Tower offers smart, creative approaches to all forms of marketing communications ranging among traditional methods such as advertising, printed materials and sales promotion and extending to interactive strategies for web design, development, content management, e-commerce and online marketing.