The title above might seem a bit rudimentary. Of course your website isn’t static. It’s a website. But it’s funny to me how often we see and experience everything from designs that are really only meant for one-device experience or even hear from clients that they don’t think they can or should change things on their site from time to time.
I think that in marketing we are still trying to break away from the concept of perfection that we were used to with print marketing. After all with print, it needed to be relatively perfect, free of typos, and all within the correct margins because you could be spending hundreds of dollars on the print costs alone. But then the web came along, businesses started to use it to market their business, but they never really got past that initial marketing thought process.
When I look at a website concept to begin taking designs to developed reality, for instance, I don’t just think of how the site looks now. I think through what our customer is like, what their customers are like, and how their site might need to change in 6 months, a year, 2 years, and more. My main goal in building a site is that it can continue to be dynamic as their business changes. Of course I also think through and build it to work on any size device, because let’s be honest, not all customers will research on the same one. But the most important thing is that the site should be able to grow with the business to some degree.
This can mean anything from a non-constrained design (where if a word gets changed an entire block gets thrown off) to making it easy for a customer to change internally, including adding a landing page here or there for new services. After all, your business isn’t the same as it was last year, was it? So why would your website be?
Done is Better than Perfect Because Your Site Can Change
This is harder for business owners to understand then your average marketing agency. All too often we see clients get hung up in the content phase, focused on a simple words, or in the design phase changing out image after image to get it “perfect”.
Here’s the hard truth – most users won’t care. You won’t lose the sale because of one word in a paragraph or because this picture is slightly lighter then another one. At the end of the day, you need to focus on overall message, are you telling the story you want your browsers to get? Do they understand how you solve their problems? Does your business personality feel like the right fit for their own?
These are the things that will matter to them. Making sure the overall message of your site is correct is important. Making sure your users understand how to navigate your site and how they can get in touch with you is also important. Focus on those things, and then launch it because at the end of the day, your website is one of the most important pieces of your entire marketing strategy.
After your site has launched, spend that time listening to your customers and your prospects. Is something consistently not clicking? Then reevaluate, make some changes, and listen some more. Have your marketing agency help you add new services or assist you with a content strategy as you grow. Don’t change for the sake of it, but don’t feel like you can’t either.
At the end of the day, the best thing about a website vs. print is that it can change. You’re not constrained to certain measurements, images, or words until you run out of that 1,000 copies you had made. Focusing your marketing strategy on growth and change can help your site not only compete with Google, it will also give your prospects something to keep coming back for. So go change that paragraph, swap out an image, or update your services. Keep your site an accurate reflection of your company and remember that you don’t have to be static.