How do you think about your website?

Here’s one way, a website is an online investment which should deliver an acceptable return on investment (ROI)?  We like to stress the investment component because, like you, we are bottom line folks who wants to make sound business decisions based on facts and not fads.

The facts are when we create a website for a client we try to use the best project management practices like SCRUM methodology to deliver a project experience and website that meets or exceeds our clients expectations.  But after all this hard work and communication will the website be perfect?  Truthfully, probably not.  Huh…?

The truth is that websites and their strategies can always be modified, tweaked and enhanced so that they achieve their goals more readily.  Another factor is that the online landscape is constantly changing so that a website created for Google search engines may need to be adapted to be viewed on cell phones, integrated with Facebook and/or other electronic media uses.  It sounds daunting, but no worries, the key is:

• Keep your goals in focus
• Have an adaptable website (think content management system, CMS)
• Continually evaluate your progress towards your goals
• Make changes based on data

For example, you may have a website with a goal to draw new clients to purchase your products and services.  Your website is live online with the information but you wisely decide that if you wrote some blogs about your new offerings and engaged with social media sites like Twitter or Facebook you would begin to draw more new clients to your website.  So you go ahead and add a blog and social media links to your site and then measure the result of your efforts.

Or you want to be found by more easily by search engines, so you evaluate your content and discover that if you rewrote your content, changed some of your key words and reworded your meta titles you would be more likely to be found by search engines.  So utilizing your website’s CMS you make these changes yourself.  Now that’s search engine optimization (SEO) do-it-yourself (DIY)!

The idea is that ongoing progress will help you achieve your website goals and return on investment more quickly.  So rather than expecting a perfect website we try to encourage our clients to plan for their website to change over time in order to meet their website goals and return on investment requirements.  To do this we help our clients:

1. Design their websites using a content management system (CMS)
2. Establish clear goals and connect goal achievement to actual investment metrics (money)
3. Continually monitor the site for goal achievement (evaluate)
4. Provide data and recommendations for goal/investment achievement (optimize)

Do this and your website will fulfill its mission to be an online investment which achieves an acceptable return on investment.