Blog

Amazon.com, circa 1995

Think for a moment how your business has changed over the past year or 3.   Do you offer more products and services? Have you expanded to new markets or locations? Are your customers using your products differently or more innovatively? Has your business climate or marketplace changed? Is your old creative website design experiencing a decrease in website traffic and/or business?

Nearly every business can answer yes to 1, if not all 5 questions.  Which should prompt you to ask, has my website kept up with changes to your business model? If your business, your brand message or your product offering  has changed and your website hasn’t, then you need to assess your website, refocusing your message through fresh content and creative website design, and possibly different functionality.

A blog post by Alamo Websites offers a good checklist for updating an existing website. We could take issue with some of the points — we believe that content and creative website design are not a D-I-Y project or one for web-based services such as Fiver  — however, we like the steps listed.

1. Set goals for your website. What problem do you want to solve?  What keeps you up at night? Every website should have creative website design – and writing – to meet business goals.
2. Set a website budget and make sure it covers everything you need your website to do. Creative website design and function factors that affect cost include the complexity of pages and whether you need to have a shopping cart, take credit cards or make the site “responsive” to the size of the screen it is being viewed on (mobile typically accounts from more than 1 out of 3 visits).
3. Do website research. What is good and what’s not good about your current site’s performance.
4. Get ready to hire a web designer. Look at their website and portfolio, and do it with your business goals in mind. Do you want a creative website design to reflect your current brand image, or is a cookie-cutter template better align your business goals?
5. Sign a firm contract. There’s some good advice here about what each party should expect from each other and how you will handle changes. That goes for brand new websites or redesigned websites.  For creative website design, do you get to make revisions?  For development, who does your QA?
6. Learn how websites work. Some of this may be a little technical, but for those of you like to know a little more about what’s under the hood, it’s a good explanation.

We could write a separate blog on making sure content and graphics work together and how content – written and video – needs to work with SEO. In fact, we will be doing that in the near future. It ties together with updating your message and your image.

That’s where NicheLabs comes in. Our professional branding specialists, designers, content writers and programmers can work as a team to help you keep your marketing up to date with your business reality. We are a full-service agency for businesses that don’t have a CMO or VP of Marketing or that don’t have the people or time to do website design, manage SEO and digital/ direct marketing campaigns. As part of your team, we can create the channels for pushing out your content and work with you to get the information out to your targeted market. 

For more tips and insights about digital marketing advancements, connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or subscribe to our monthly newsletter to read summaries of our weekly posts.

Let’s talk about creating a website as part of a marketing program that speaks to your customers today. To speak with our team, please email us at sales@nichelabs.com, call 888.978.9254, or if you are mobile, visit us on your smartphone.