#SupportLocal

in conjunction with
YourHerefordshire.co.uk

#SupportLocal

in conjunction with
YourHerefordshire.co.uk

Reading time: 5 mins

Mark Thurman

10 February 2021

#SupportLocal

Is your website hurting your business?

Keep casual visitors interested & compel pro-active visitors to act!

This, the first of two articles on making changes to your business in the time of Covid, focuses on your website.

The uncertainty of the last 6 months and the likelihood of possibly another 12 months disruption to business means that your response to the Covid crisis is more important than ever.

You may be an existing business, with an established website that isn't performing as well as you'd like, or maybe you are a new start-up, or thinking of starting a business and will need a website soon; either way these are the things to avoid in order to keep you website visitors happy and focused on your offerings and not the site itself.

About us

Credible Systems was founded in 2008 with the aim of helping organisations improve through the correct use of technology and experience earnt in the world of enterprise sized technology projects.

The usual suspects

Your website

More than just a brochure, your website is often the thing that customers see and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

That impression is often poorest when the website is:

Broken or displays incorrectly
Slow to load
Poor or frustrating navigation
Not optimised for mobile devices
Hard to read with poor font & colour choices
Is not engaging (more on this later)
Contact details are buried / missing

Are these common mistakes?

Very common, and actually some seem to be becoming more prevalent rather than improving. Many can be fixed pretty easily, so perhaps the question is why don't these get fixed?

Different approaches lead to different sets of problems.

There are lots of ways to skin a cat. It is the same with websites. If we simplify somewhat we could categorise these in the following ways.

Site builders

Easy, but limited

1Site buillders that are provided by Hosting companies like WIX etc that enable a drag and drop approach to page building. You can only use these if your site is hosted with the same provider.

Pro's
Easy to use Free Mobile friendly

Con's
Limited functionality Doesn't conform to best practices Hard to extend

Buily by CMS

Nice middle ground

2A CMS or Content Management System is method of separating the content of a website (text/images etc) from the code that makes it work.

Pro's
Minimal training Free Mobile friendly Highly functional Lots of add-ons

Con's
Requires updates

Hand coded

Best technical solution, but comes with a price and ongoing costs

3You have the websites that are built purely by code. Bespoke in every way, and requiring plenty of skilled resources to reach a satifying conclusion.

Pro's
Greatest flexibility Greatest ability

Con's
Requires greatest resources Requires an expert to update Most expensive

Our choice

CMS all day long!

🤟 About 95% of the websites we create are done so using a CMS like Joomla! or Wordpress. We think it makes the most sense for the vast majority of small businesses

Pro's
Secure Proven Contains page builder tools! We provide training You can update yourself

But remember
Security/Maintenance subscription recommended

Problems of Design

Websites can get complex...

You either embrace the complexity with a bespoke website design, or you abstract it away like the Site Builders do. In the case of the latter, the software lets you create pages without any knowledge of coding what so ever, but at the expense of what choice. You can ONLY do what the platform allows.

So you are sacrificing ability for ease. The same is true of the obverse of course; bespoke websites offer anything that is technically possible, but it's not something many business owners can create, let alone want to support.

The CMS route however tries, successfully we think, to operate in the sweet spot between the two. Offering greatly enhanced features, with speed of design and build.