something to say ...
These days, most business owners would agree that having a website is a necessity. But when you have a website designed for your organisation, are you just going through the motions in order to "tick another thing of the list?" In my blog post today I wanted to pin the concept of website design up on the wall and actually ask the big question: "what is a website for?"
A website's purpose in life
When you're accounting for the expense of a website design in your accounts at the end of the year, what expense category do you put it under? Computer Software? Asset? IT? We believe the answer to that question should be "Marketing".
In some respects this makes sense, right? A lot of people think of a website as an online brochure of their company, and in many ways this would be correct. But while a traditional paper brochure is printed once and can be used by prospective customers to reference what your company can provide them with, a website can actively engage with visitors and drive sales to your product or service.
Driving visitors to a site
Of course visitors can reach your website through multiple channels and it's commonplace to run several different campaigns at any one time to drive traffic to your site. These could include click-throughs from Search Engine results, referrals from a link someone's posted on Twitter or Facebook, an email newsletter and many more.
So then... what is a website?
We've established that a website is an extension of your organisation's marketing strategy and that there are multiple channels through which people can reach it. Now visualise your website at the centre of your little digital universe with traffic streams coming from all these different sources. Now let's ask that question again... what is a website?
A website is the hub of your digital marketing strategy
Conclusion
There are no doubt lots of ways you could consider your website's purpose, but this is currently my preferred way of defining a website. It gets away from the mindset of just throwing up an online brochure and ticking it off your list: far better to treat it as a marketing hub which you can use to leverage sales.
Besides which, it has a nice ring to it.
About us: we're a web design company based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.