Author: Melissa Priest

Does your company need a website? How to tell if your company needs a website….

Posted on by Melissa Priest
  • Do you want new customers?
  • Do your customers or potential customers use the internet?
  • Might they have questions about your business or the products and services you offer?
  • Do you have a street location that people need to find?
  • Do you or your employees have skills or expertise in your industry?
  • Do you have a product or service to sell?
  • Do you have competitors?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, your company needs a website.

It’s no longer enough just to be listed in the yellow pages or a business directory. These days most research is done online.

People use the internet to search for the products and services they need. They’re looking for as much information as they can when researching and making a decision.

If there are two companies offering the same or similar products or services, one has a listing in a business directory, and the other has a comprehensive website with information about its products and services, the second company will in most cases be chosen.

People want information. They want to build trust. They want to make an informed choice when parting with their hard-earned cash.

A website can bring new customers to your business. It can help showcase your products and services. It can help showcase you and your employees and your skills and expertise. It can display your previous work, or help you share what you know about your industry. It can help answer questions customers might have, therefore saving you time and money repeating the same information over the phone or email.

It can help people find your location, or where to park when they visit you.

A website has so many advantages for your business.

If you don’t have a website, or your website is old and outdated, contact us to chat about setting up a website for you.

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Review Your Own Website

Posted on by Melissa Priest

As a business and website owner, you are possibly the worst person to perform a usability review, or audit of your own website, here’s why:

  1. It’s fair to say that you know your business and its processes, and potentially the industry you operate in, back to front. So you have a built-in knowledge that you may assume everyone else has. Which could lead you to include jargon, acronyms or information on your website written in a way that others might not understand. It’s often hard to separate yourself from this knowledge and look at things from a new perspective.
  2. As an expert in your field you might not be an expert in the web, so it’s best to defer to someone who is. Areas such as buyer behaviour, online merchandising, online marketing, user-centred design, are foreign to you and you don’t have the time or interest to learn them.
  3. You have looked at your site every day for the last x years and have lost the ability to look at your site from a fresh perspective.
  4. You love your website and think it’s perfect in every way, therefore potentiall not looking at it objectively.
  5. You are too busy! You have more than enough work to keep you going just keeping the business running.

They say a good website should have a redesign at least every two years, so where do you start when thinking about a redesign and what happens if you can’t afford a complete redesign?

Often there are small incremental changes you can make to improve the user-experience of your website, and the best way to discover these changes is via a website usability evaluation or audit.

By having a usability expert evaluate your site, and look at it with a fresh set of eyes, you can learn some simple changes you could make to your website that could make a difference to your business.

We can review your site and provide you with a ten minute video highlighting some key opportunities on your site. We can also provide you with a detailed report outlining these opportunities and showing you some great examples of sites doing things well. This can feed into  a whole website redesign, or show you some small changes that could make a big difference to your site.

Contact us to chat about an affordable review of your website.