Yes, yes, yes!
So the calendar just turned over to 2015 and we can say with almost certainty that you own a smart phone, a computer and probably some kind of tablet like an iPad. You probably use these devices for business and pleasure, email, facebook and keeping in touch with people far away. But what happens if one of your clients, new or old, wants to get in touch with your business? Are you easy to find? Can they view your site on any of their many devices? We thought January was a great time to reflect on why you need a website and how it can work for you.
So what should your website do?
For starters, it shouldn’t try to replace an existing service, you might think you can do realestate.com better than realestate.com, but unfortunately, this is pretty unlikely. No, what your website should really do and really all it needs to do, is inform the public about who you are, what you do and where to find you. Imagine yourself in your day to day life, how frustrating is it when you’re trying to find a business that you need to visit for something business or personal related and you can’t find their address! Or worse still, they don’t even have a website at all, most of the time, your page viewers want very simple information about your business. Where are you? What are your opening hours? And how can they contact you? If you don’t have a website, you’re making your customers frustrated and if you don’t have a good website, sometimes that can be worse.
Simple design and mobile friendliness are a MUST
The design of your site is just as important as the site being there in the first place and one of the most important parts of your websites design is your first impression, the homepage. The homepage is the first thing people see when they visit the online you.
When put together, the difference is pretty obvious, one site gives you a clear, concise idea of what it’s all about, while the other would take a microscope and a team of archaeologists to find what you were looking for!
The statistics on mobile internet usage are pretty astounding, 15% of total internet usage in Australia is on a mobile device, crazier still 2013 statistics indicated that 90% of smartphone owners use the internet on their phone daily, 58% use search engines like Google, and 52% of people ended up visiting a business or services website after those searches. What we’re trying to get at is, your website NEEDS to be mobile friendly. Have you ever opened up a site on your smartphone only to be greeted with miniscule text, or worse, half of a website that you can’t see the other half of? It can be incredibly frustrating, and many times, can make you look at alternative businesses who have more friendly sites.
I’m not convinced, what are the alternatives?
So we’ve made some good points, but maybe you really can’t part with that $X per year or still don’t see the point in a website, there are some alternatives.
Setup your business on Google+: Go ahead and google west coast property training, you’ll get something like below.
While our website is listed on the left, you’ll notice Google has also provided some great information, including images, a map and our opening hours on the right. How helpful! That isn’t an accident, Google pulls all of that information from the West Coast Property Training Google+ page (https://plus.google.com/108768727921484515495/about) this is a free page to setup, in fact, if your business gets searched for a lot, you might find a page has already been automatically created. You can easily apply to manage the page and fill it full of all your information, that way when folks search for you, they may not get a website, but they’ll still get all the information they need.