With the push towards e-commerce, you would expect that companies would place more emphasis on the inner workings of their website. My initial assumption was that most small business owners or medium sized firms didn’t really care if they had a website or not, but I am happy to report that I was proven wrong over time. The problem is that most companies don’t know how to use their website or have the means to design and build an appropriate one.
They understand the importance of e-commerce as a way to not only have a presence in search engines, but open their products and services to other countries without needing brick and mortar offices in those areas. It all really starts with a strategy. What do I need my website to do? In the case of manufacturing, which is the industry I have had the most recent experience, you’re looking at lead generation using an informative strategy. This means educating the user about your products or capabilities and then calling them to action. In other words, you establish credibility through the use of body copy, rich media content such as images and videos, and then provide the necessary link to contact; whether it is a form for a quote request or a number to call or in some cases, online chat.
Visual credibility really plays into an individual’s perception of what you can and cannot offer them, but design only means so much. If the site doesn’t function well and the user gets lost clicking through pages, then there isn’t really a point in providing a contact page because they won’t find it. Manufacturers are going to generally adopt an informative strategy, so you know what types of website content and contact methods that will be used, but what about the design?
I’ve never been much of a web designer, but I am certainly a marketer with the alignment of strategic planning in mind. I do understand the wondrous world of technology and how to get around in various software suites, but I’ll stress that it is very easy to get started and to improve a website. The first thing to do is to seek out a host for the website. Whether you decide to do onsite hosting or to use a provider, it is important to determine if you want the responsibility of server upkeep and maintenance. Secondly, do a little research on the keywords you would want to rank organically in search engines for. Using your company name is fine, but if you can find a domain without squatting, then that will help you get to the top of Google or Bing. If your product categories are what you want to rank for, I can almost guarantee someone has already taken those domains. However, you just will have to make sure to have pages with the titles in the URL that would help you achieve a certain level of search impressions and traffic.
Secondly, I’d build the website using a CMS or content management system such as Joomla! or Word Press. Both share much of the same functionality, but each platform has different plug-ins and styles of templates. Template files can be modified so there is a lot of room for customization. You have to install these into C-panel in order to use them, but once they are installed then the CMS becomes your interface to website creation. It reduces the need to learn some HTML, but as I’ve quickly learned, you can only avoid it for so long. You’ll want to integrate your branding across every page, but your home page or index page needs to be the core focus of your site. It tends to be the main page that individuals land on when searching for your company. The great thing about using templates and existing tools such as Joomla! or Word Press is the ability to envision your strategy. These templates often have sites up online that are examples of the template in action. You can usually get a good idea how the template will work for you from these examples. It is also important to look at what the competitors are doing, so getting some research up front about what your customers want and expect of you online and what your competitors are doing is very critical.
With the recent growth in social media, especially in B2C, I can only assume that this will grow in the manufacturing sector as well. I’ve integrated our social media accounts on our website and our blogs through simple icons and links. This provides not only links to more content, but this also impacts your linking structure which helps your page rank in Google. Without diving into the step by step details of building a site, you should modify the color scheme to match your industry. However, be sure to monitor the size of files and how you use your content. There has been a huge emphasis on site loading times, so larger photos and embedded videos increase the time it takes to load a page. As far as building the site, there are thousands of pages on Joomla! or Word Press site building, so this isn’t really the venue for it.
Some of the websites that I have stumbled upon recently are mostly images, some that don’t even have metadata to describe what the photo represents. Another major issue that I see with manufacturer’s websites is that they often do not have contact forms or contact information beyond the company’s location. Always provide a venue for contact, and because site widgets can easily provide contact forms, always have more than just a phone number. This could streamline the contact and quoting process. Moreover, always have real text not image files with text. At this present time Google cannot read text in images or flash files, although they have tested some technology in this area. The mistakes that have been pointed out seem to be the most common. It should not be very difficult to avoid these and there are plenty of Joomla! and Word Press developers that can build a site that is cost effective and very functional. This is the main benefit of using pre-defined templates instead of 100% custom designs. Cost is usually the biggest barrier to the investment.
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