Everyone knows that If your business does not have a website, you’re missing out on potential customers. But, did you know that if your business’ website is out of date, using old-style elements, or hard to navigate that you may also be losing out on potential customers?
How We Use the Internet Today
Your potential customers and clients use the internet differently than they did even 5 years ago. Today, it’s all about mobility and ease of access. How often do you look up things on your phone? Probably a lot.
Have you ever looked up a business from your phone and then clicked directly on a phone number to dial? Isn’t that nice and easy? Not having to manually type in that phone number is a time saver and keeps you from being frustrated when you’re just trying to make a phone call. You want your website to be convenient in this way for your customers and clients.
Don’t Lose Customers
Here’s another scenario. Have you ever looked up a specific service in your area? Maybe looking for a roofing company or a company that installs glass block. When you find a website of a potential company, you may see that their website is a little dated, but functional. This isn’t a huge turnoff, but it can be annoying when trying to navigate an older website on your phone.
What about coming across a website that is clearly broken? Links don’t work, pictures are not loading? This is a big turnoff for your potential customers. They are more than likely going to leave your website and look for another potential company.
Today’s Websites
Modern websites generally are minimalistic, future-driven, and need to be refreshed often. Depending on the type of industry and how quickly your product of services change, will depend on how often your website needs to be refreshed.
Not only your business changes, but the technology behind the scenes is changing rapidly. An element that you use today for a picture gallery may work wonderfully right now, but the developer of the picture gallery application that you use may stop updating that application and it suddenly stops working on your website one day.
Every little element of your website could potentially be built by small pieces, each created by different developers. Your website application, hosting service, website theme, and any other plugins or applications all have to work together. One part breaks it all breaks.
Modern websites aren’t “set it and forget it” anymore. There are too many factors out there to let your site sit out in cyberspace without a monthly or quarterly peek under the hood.
Security
There are several security issues that should be considered when maintaining your website. The older the site is, the less likely it will be protected, especially from the newer threats out there. The newest elements that build websites will have built-in features plus there are a lot of additional security features that I like to add when building a website for our clients.
The Look
The look of your website says a lot about your company. Who you are. What you stand for. Where you’re going. You want people to open your website and say “Wow, this company looks awesome!” Your website is your greatest marketing tool. It serves as your brochure, point of contact, selling points, and reference. You want it to be bright, shiny, and representative of your company.
Consider a Blog
A blog isn’t “Dear Diary”. A blog is a huge potential marketing tool. We use our blog to keep clients on the up-and-up, inform them of new security risks, keep them up to date on new technology, services offered, tips and tricks, and more.
Many companies use a blog to showcase new services or products, show off pictures of recent work done, or other marketing items.
A blog is also a simple way to add to your website without having to call your website developer every single time you have an update, which can be time-consuming and costly. If you can create a document in Microsoft Word, you can create a blog post.
Link up to Social Media
Speaking of blogs, did you know that it can be arranged through third-party applications to automatically send your blog posts to social media? You don’t have to spend hours of your time posting to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can write your blog post, post it, then it automatically gets sent out to your other accounts. Easy Peasy!
Think about your current website. Is it up to snuff? Is it more than three years old? Do you have new products, examples, showcase items that need to be presented? It might be time for an update.
Harbor Computer Services offers website services from hosting, developing, and maintenance. We would be more than happy to sit down with you and talk about your website and what we can do to make it ship-shape! Just give us a call.
About Harbor Computer Services
Harbor Computer Services is an IT firm servicing Southeastern Michigan. We work exclusively under contract with our clients to provide technology direction and either become the IT department or provide assistance to the internal IT they already have. We have won many awards for our work over the years, including the worldwide Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2010. Most recently we were recognized as one of the top MSP’s in the nation by ChannelFutures coming in at #40 nationwide. And in 2016 as the top Michigan IT firm for Manufacturing. There are a few simple things that make Harbor Computer Services the best choice for your business. •We are Professionals •We are Responsible •We care about your business
