The world wide web is powerful, there is no denying that. It’s estimated that there are roughly 189,000,000 active websites online and that is alot of websites. More importantly how do you make your website more desirable to search engines when there is such saturated competition?

When I have orientation meetings with clients its a crucial part of the workflow to clearly objectify what they need to achieve with their website. Alot of marketing individuals don’t do a great job of explaining “achieve” to clients. Something I have learnt over the years of doing marketing, web development is to speak normal language with clients. I have a different way of doing things, I lead clients to discover their achievements during our discovery meetings. Thus they aren’t hit with “What do you want to achieve” right out of the gates and thrown down the proverbial rabbit hole.

My website does very little for my business, why would I spend money on it. We’re not an online business.

I find it counter intuitive when I hear “we are not an online business” or “not selling online” especially when a client has a website. If you have a website and are online you’re selling something either your words, products, promotions etc. It’s just understanding what you’re selling and then bundling that with business strategy that works.

48. 66% of companies use online advertising and do so through a variety of channels. The most popular are:

(The Manifest)

Just because you are not an ecommerce business does NOT mean your website shouldn’t drive conversion. I have clients who are in construction industries etc who work on bid based contract proposals who generate revenue through their websites without ecommerce. I have industrial supply clients who specialize in niche markets such as drainage and grating systems who generate revenue streams from both their ecommerce & info sites. The key is how you market it and who you work with.

Something important to consider as well are things like direct traffic & organic search traffic driven by your sales, promotions and of course google SEO ranking efforts which tie into the above promotional strategies. Considering your website is online 24hrs 365 days a year a business minded individual would see this as a huge opportunity.

Consider my personal website, to portfolio or not?

The core fundamental element of a good marketer is understanding a customer and furthermore understanding what they value. In 2019 I introduced “Service Plans” to clients to alleviate high expense projects for clients and rather worked them into a business agreement which offer consistency to the service provider and lower costs with added benefits of knowledge, support and layered management. Clients wanted a platform that integrated with their websites additional to a gateway portal to login for items like invoices, files, data etc. Thus in my case a portfolio wasn’t necessarily where I should spend a great deal of time and energy rather my clients needed a more immersive experience that catered to their need of business tools.

Do you invest in your staff? Of course you do, then why wouldn’t you invest in a full time sales tool that markets your business to an infinite number of potential customers?

There are so many reasons for people to invest in web, digital and print. One very important one is consistency and branding. A consistent brand to the market means higher recall and recognition. If you repetitively have the same look, feel and messaging customers will notice. The third is security, countries with the highest web usage are unfortunately countries that pose great risk to us in regards to hacking and exposure. When I build marketing solutions for a client (in my case this includes websites) I always clearly identify and geo fence their builds in the event that they are NOT seeking global business growth. Why? Breach attempts, jeopardized files, hacks or malware come from people looking to ruin your day and as a business your website is a digital property that requires protection, attention and thought.

Updates, API’s all help keep your website well informed of potential threats. Clients pay me to ensure their websites are up to date, running security software and also coded to help mitigate these risks. Atlas, Galileo (my themes) are designed to remove potential issues of error if the user doesn’t need those functions from the WordPress core.

The four “P” of website building & why I’m a unique option for your business.

I use the four P’s of site building to help clients. Planning, Performance, Plugins and lastly Platform. These crucial elements are important when creating scalable and speed optimized websites. My clients in 2022 are running on Kinsta servers they are beyond amazing hosts. I wish I had invested the money years ago to get the kind of hosting I have now. Fast, reliable, consistent and best of all scalable.

Planning:

Planning is thinking out and strategizing your web experience. During this stage is compiling old data, previous data models that work and tools that previously must be carried over to the new platform. Legacy tools are tested thoroughly in the Galileo framework then added to. This ensures performance or compatibility issues are ironed out before we introduce other code. User flows, user experience and of course data/copy and media are also introduced and planned at this stage formulated around your brand guide.

Performance:

Key factors for me are consolidating my clients expenses, optimizing their experience and lessening their workloads. This means a rock solid CMS solution hosted on the most ideal framework and a powerful robust content delivery network (CDN). I also at this stage implement and setup all the marketing tools we integrate from CRM’s, live chats, slack communication modules etc.

Plugins:

All the plugins I spec for clients are annual expenses, this means you pay them and then they all reknew together after the build, this really helps you not only track your web expenses but plan for the annual expense. I have also been using the same group of plugins for years, they are paid but their performance and ability to tailor them to my needs is a perfect fit. If clients need additional plugins integrated thats great lets work them into the build!

Platform:

Alot of clients want their websites to speak to their systems. For instance my website should feed my public slack channel, or it should post to my CRM so my sales team can follow up on qualified leads. There are so many avenues to take the important part is working with someone who can help educate you and also deploy the solutions in a timely manner.

/jy