Cool Cherry Cream

Why your website sucks

We had a guest speaker in my Entrepreneurship class the other day. He mentioned that his company has a website, but that they had only ever received one call from it.

Today as we were discussing the guest speaker, this issue came up. The teacher said we might be making websites for our fictitious company, but someone mentioned what the guest speaker said and concluded that company websites are obviously a waste of time.

As you probably know I'm going to tell you, this kid is dead wrong.

I've seen a few guest speakers in my day, and oftentimes they mention a website, which I then go home and visit. And then… I laugh. Times New Roman? <blink>? HA!

But this guy, his website was actually alright design wise. I didn't look to much at the actual content, because that doesn't interest me.

Actually, one reason why this particular company wouldn't get a lot of sales from their website is for a very reason he mentioned in his presentation: they don't sell anything tangible. You can't see it, you can't feel it, you can't hear it. It's hard to market something you can't see. They also have a very specific market, so regular people like you and me probably won't need their product, and only if you live within this region would you even bother calling them. So that's probably the biggest reason.

I've helped a few friends and family with business websites. My thing is that I just do the initial coding and design. I'm not making any content; that's up to you. And if you're involved with web design, I don't need to tell you, "content is king". Yada yada yada, we get it. Well, actually, a lot of people don't, so here it is again: content is king.

I only took a quick look at his website, I suppose because I couldn't make fun of the design it didn't interest me. I don't know who designs and maintains their website or anything they've done with it, but I do know it was first in Google when I typed in their company name, and that's great. But if you don't know their company's name, then you might have trouble finding them; I haven't checked Google rankings for any other keywords.

So, like I've said, I've helped a few people with websites in my day. And the same thing happens over and over. I code/design the site. I hand it over to the proper owner. Proper owner fiddles around for a few days and adds and updates content. Proper owner forgets about website.

Obviously, that will not do. You can't make a website and not update it and expect people to use it! You have to constantly update it. I know I get pretty bad at that sometimes, but I'm not using my websites solely to make money, it's not my job.

One website that I've made for my dad is doing super well. You know why? Because my dad is constantly emailing people and posting on forums advertising the site. Not spamming mind you, although some might call it that. I would say spamming is going on a ton of unrelated sites and posting links to your site. He's contacting people from local related websites who actually would find his website useful. And they do!

So seriously, this should be common sense, but it must not be, because so many websites go un-updated and un-advertised. If you want to make money off your site and/or have lots of visitors, you need to be committed. You need to be motivated. You need to actually put in effort! I know, groan groan, but you can't expect things to happen without working at it.