Give your Web site a facelift: 11 tips
By Joanna L. Krotz
You remember it well: that day back in the late 1990s, when
your company Web site first went live. It looked swell at
the time, and you were so proud to have graduated to the Internet
Age.
Here's a fair question: How many times since have you refreshed
the graphics or content of your Web site? Twice? Once? Not
at all?
Most businesses, it turns out, are still hosting first-generation
sites that went up at the turn of the millennium, experts
say. Likewise, the majority of these sites are passé
by today's "make-it-useful" standards -- sometimes embarrassingly
so.
Internet-savvy businesses will refresh the content on their
Web sites regularly and will redesign their sites at least
once a year. Why? For one reason, sales staffs at some companies
avoid steering prospects to a business whose Web site appears
out-of-date or is difficult to use, says Ilise Benun, author
of "Designing Web Sites for Every Audience."
It takes only a byte or two of dated information for visitors
to conclude they've hit a dead end or landed on an orphaned
site. Plus, when a big-deal client clicks on your "urgent"
invitation to attend an upcoming seminar, only to find that
the event came and went back in 2002 and you simply haven't
bothered to take it down, he will feel annoyed and foolish.
And you'll be toast.
So consider this a noisy wakeup call. It's the 21st century.
Is your Web site still in 1999?
Site specific suggestions
Business sites vary widely. But for the purposes of site
facelifts, differences boil down to how frequently you must
make changes. Consulting services may update sites only quarterly
or even annually. E-commerce sites or research companies may
require updates by the hour.
Whatever your needs, you can now find appropriate and affordable
off-the-shelf software and third-party service providers to
do the job. You can, for instance, put a fresh "skin" on your
old site without disrupting any functionality. (For more information,
check out Microsoft's Web Hosting solutions for small businesses.)
"With options ranging from pre-packaged solutions to offshore
IT development, businesses can get up to 10 times the Web
site they could afford just three years ago at one-tenth the
price," says Bryan Lyng at Lyng and Associates, a marketing
communications and Web development company in Los Angeles.
Here are 11 ideas culled from Web marketers and developers
that can modernize your site swiftly without costing you a
bundle.
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1. |
Reduce the number of site pages. Focus
on redesigning only the core 10 to 15 pages, suggests
Matt Greer, chief executive officer at Zeeo Interactive
in Boston, a Web design services company. You can then
archive any remaining popular or highly trafficked pages
into Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word documents that are
suitable for download. |
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2. |
Make the site a marketing tool. If
you're not yet capturing data basics, such as which
sites and search engines visitors are clicking from
or which pages are most trafficked, get cracking.
Use prepackaged software or a Web services provider
such as Microsoft's FastCounter Pro to capture detailed
information about site visitors. "The first question
to ask is: 'When visitors come to your site, what do
you want them to do?'" says Erin Duckhorn, spokesperson
for Crucial Technology, an online memory upgrade provider
based in Boise, Idaho. Once you have answers, you can
define the tracking metrics and develop the content,
navigation and structure that will quickly satisfy your
targeted visitors. |
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3. |
Set up an e-mail program. Create an
incentive for visitors to register or give you their
e-mail addresses. "Give away something that the targeted
audience would perceive as value for their exchange
of personal information, like a prize for consumers
or a white paper for business-to-business clients,"
suggests Jeff Stanislow, president and CEO of Motor
City Interactive, a digital advertising agency in Novi,
Mich. Once you have addresses, send out useful e-zines
or other bulletins. |
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4. |
Create an online reward for prized customers.
Treat your best customers with distinctive
perks or discounts. "You can give them their own area
of the site without any special technology," says Wally
Bock, a Web consultant in Wilmington, N.C. You can also,
of course, e-mail special offers. |
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5. |
Speed loading time. In the beginning,
fancy graphics and online applets were cool. Now, they're
mere obstacles in the path of getting to information
or products. Three words for you: Streamline. Streamline.
Streamline. |
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6. |
Give visitors greater, self-directed control.
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, for example,
reworked its site (www.fairmonthotels.com) to expand
online booking capabilities. Now, guests who make online
room reservations can book dinner or spa services at
the same time. The site also added a "Fairmont Planner"
that matches individual resort properties to guest profiles
or needs, as well as a "virtual concierge" that offers
more details about services.
The changes resulted in significant growth in bookings
at the hotel chain and its amenities in recent years,
says spokesman Mike Taylor. TravelCLICK's eTRAK study
of more than 30 industry Web sites clocked an increase
in Fairmont bookings of 165% in 2002. |
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7. |
Get fashionable. Revise the site's
color palette. One opinion: "Think Far East colors,
like rust, persimmon, mustard or saffron, and dump the
jewel tones and zebra stripes that look like clothes
from the back of your closet," says Dali Wiederhoft,
a Minneapolis publicist. |
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8. |
Invest in a content management system. Stop
relying on static HTML. "This used to be a big investment
only feasible for the big boys," says Dmitri Buterin,
who heads the Toronto office of Web developer BonaSource.
"But now, for an investment of $5,000 to $10,000, anyone
can get a pretty good CMS [content management system]
and basically make most updates on their own." |
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9. |
Insure visibility on search engines. The
old home page of BreastCancer.org, a nonprofit informational
group based in Narberth, Pa., was dominated by a giant
image of the organization's logo, an illustrated character
called Polly, which prevented search engines from finding
the site. "The makeover moved a smaller Polly to the
upper right corner of the home page and used text and
text links to guide the not particularly Web-savvy users
of this site toward the essential information they came
looking for," says Ilise Benun. |
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10. |
Align the site to the organization. No
doubt, you've reinvented your business a half-dozen
times over the past few years. How appropriate is your
site now? What about secondary channels or pages? "Many
businesses grow their sites in piecemeal fashion," notes
Kevin McLaughlin at Public/i, a public relations firm
in New Brunswick, N.J. "As new sections are added over
time, the same messages or positioning is not always
reflected in the copy throughout the company's entire
Web site." Make sure your site's messaging is always
in tune with offline marketing. |
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11. |
Add testimonials or success stories. "Very
few sites do this and there's no question that they
add major credibility for buyers," says Philippa Gamse,
a Web strategy consultant in Santa Cruz, Calif. Ask
longtime customers for quotes or permission to post
their case histories and their satisfaction with your
services. |
Any of these ideas will help update your online presence.
But the real advice is simply not to get lazy. Pay attention
to your Web site whenever you shift direction or significantly
grow the business. Times, indeed, have changed. All marketing
and messaging must be seamless -- consistent, uniform, multimedia
and multi-channel. Move your Web site into the new century.
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