We get a lot of referrals from customers who are happy with our services and tell their friends & colleagues that we are the best website management company. This is because our clients enjoy working with us and like to spread the word. I appreciate this more than they will ever know as my business is referral driven. While we get business from other sources, there is no better lead than a referral from a happy customer. Recently the question came to me directly: So, why are you the best website management company?
As I always tell people you need to have your Elevator Speech ready to go. Now this doesn’t have to be lengthy and should just be around 30 seconds, I break down mine into 5 main points. So here’s how I answer:
So that is it in a nutshell. This is our main selling point. The way the industry has grown, a lot of people wanted to design and build websites as they felt this was fun, sexy. But after the sites were built, these companies want to move onto the next project and not interested at all website management. I get more business from companies whose previous web developer has disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, they need help with their website and are stuck. Fortunately most of the time we can help.
The problem is that today’s web technology, especially with CMS’s* like WordPress require constant attention. Plug-ins are updated all the time, as is WordPress and theme files. If you ignore them eventually your site will break and/or get hacked. Now while it’s sold as something you can manage yourself, unless you know how to get a site back after it breaks from a bad plug-in version, you need to have a professional and manage your site. This of course is where RooSites shines. We will make all the updates on your behalf and come up with a support plan to keep you up to date and secure. Our support plans are tailered to fit your companies needs. While some companies only need an hour or two each month some need as many as 10, 20 hours a month, and some even require unlimited support.
As an example, recently I took over for a nonprofit who had over 20 plug-in/theme/WordPress updates. Now to safely do this, I had to set up a staging site where I test all these updates properly as their site was so woefully out of date. Now it is up to date, and secure. Prior to that, they tried to manage everything themselves, but it became overwhelming as they are all working on their main jobs, which of course is the nonprofit agency they work for.
So please, if you need help managing your website or designing and building one, please contact us, we are happy to help you. Being the best website management company is something we are extremely proud of and work hard every single day to live up to. We don’t live off of our laurels, and try and improve each and every day. But don’t take our word for it, check out our testimonials, and if you need to speak to some of our clients, we are happy to connect you.
I was at an old mill last weekend where they now sell furniture and all kinds of vintage items. Outside the place was this ancient pickup truck. The truck was rusted and probably hasn’t run for years. Now, instead of scrapping this old truck, they chose to make it into a planter. And what a beautiful planter it is!
So, like everything else I am always drawn back to ideas for my business, designing and maintaining websites. (I know, only a geek would be constantly thinking about web stuff. I am what I am)
But I had some ideas looking at this old truck. Many websites (like the truck), don’t need to be scrapped, but they do need some sprucing up.
So here are five ways you can do that:
By changing your logo, even a little bit, you can really make a statement. I feel that every design should start with the logo as that is the key to your branding, color scheme, etc. Over the last decade, more and ways to design logos have sprung up, so for very little money you can have a great logo.
Years ago you would go to an agency to create your logo. They would spend time and asking questions and finally come up with three possibilities to choose from, which they charge you 15, or $20,000 or more. Contact me, I will show you how to have a great logo at an affordable price. (And you’ll have many options to choose from)
Is your site filled with tacky stock photos, like the operator wearing the headset (see below) or a number of the other photos you’ve seen on a million websites? If so, consider updating the images on your website. The best photos are the ones of you and your company and your business. You can either take the photos yourself or hire a professional photographer to come in and spend a couple hours. It isn’t that expensive and the results can make a huge difference in the look and feel of your website. If must use stock photography, do it in such a way that it doesn’t have that stock-ish look. So use images that are a bit abstract, something eye-catching, but not the two guys shaking hands. (One of my pet peeves)
This Photo is on 100s of sites (if not 1,000s) and example of overused Stock Photos.
Video is a great way to add value to your website. The numbers prove that people will watch a video, more then they will read pages of text. The best part is that you can take a video yourself; it doesn’t have to be professionally produced, although of course that is a good option as well. Videos are also great to promote on social media, as people are more likely to click on a link to your blog with an embedded video than just a plain text article.
Consider these numbers from HubSpot:
1) Mobile video usage has increased by nearly 10 million daily viewing minutes in the last 2 years.
2)
Video is important, as these numbers prove. #3 is one to consider if you are looking for ideas. People love “how to” videos. So if you can produce a video that solves someone issue, chances are you will get plenty of views, and who knows, perhaps a viral video.
One thing a lot of people don’t think about when designing or working on their website is typography. Simple changes to a font as an example can make such a big difference. I was looking at a potential new client’s website the other day. Well, what hit me was they were using the smallest font sizes, and it made it hard to read. Their headline fonts were using this very fancy font-face that was difficult to make out. So, by just bumping up their body font a couple of pixels and changing their headline fonts to something far more readable, their site looked hundred times better. Because we now have Google fonts and other embedded fonts available, people have gone crazy trying to use nonstandard font families. For me, when we are talking about body fonts, the cleanest, easiest to read fonts have always been and always will be the best to use. Now, don’t get me wrong I like fancy fonts for headlines, you just don’t want to go to crazy and end up using something that people have a hard time reading. And remember, over half of your audience is probably on cell phones which makes goes small and fancy fonts very hard to read.
When you go to a website and someone has a contact form with 10 or 15 fields, chances are you don’t fill those out. So my number five tip is to simplify those forms. You want people to contact you or request more information, so collect as little information as possible. Someone’s name, phone Number and perhaps a text area for them to tell you what they need or are interested in. In this day and age people are afraid to fill out forms as they’re so scared with what company may do with the data. So by simplifying your forms hopefully you will get a better response. As most people will tell you the amount of forms filled out has declined considerably over the last five years, so make it as easy as possible for your website visitors.
So like that beautiful old truck seen above, you don’t have to scrap your website, you can make changes to spruce it up and get it looking good again. This of course is only five tips, there are obviously many things you can spruce up your website. We would be happy To help you, contact us anytime.
If you have some tips of your own, please leave them below, we always welcome comments and the opinions of others.
