Online Business Solutions

Problem: My website technology is out-dated

Clients contact us initially to have move to the stage of online marketing only to discover that their website is built on technology that is either out-dated or difficult to use.
Many business owners are tempted to hire a friend or relative to create their company website unaware that it is essential to have their website created to easily integrate with their marketing initiatives.

I recently met with a thriving company that has a "passable" website. It looked like it was built about five years ago. When I asked the company how they update the site, they said that it a tedious process that is done through their "webmaster". It turns out that the "webmaster" is a relative who works part-time developing websites and created the site through a website builder like FrontPage. The only way to update the site is to do it through that software via FTP - a task too complex for the administrative staff of the company to buy into. The price tag to do the updates was not the issue for this company. Rather, like many others we meet, the issue was the time delay between a website update request and the task completion.

Solution: Evaluate and Re-Create.

First of all, our team of strategists will help you to evaluate your website technology and website design. Here's what we look at:

• Does the time delay in editorial updates hurt your company's ability to communicate with your clients or potential customers?
• Can you create marketing tools for your company's growth using your current website technology?
• How much does it cost to migrate your website into technology that allows your staff to update the site?
• What benefits would your company achieve if the website was re-designed?
• Is a website re-design MOST important or do you need to get onto marketing for a critical business goal?

In some cases, we will recommend a website re-do as the first phase of your online marketing. This will be the case if the site is useless to benefit your company's growth or is damaging to your company's reputation. Some things we've seen in this regard are:

• sites that don't have correct grammar or use of the english language for an english audience
• sites that have no clear conversion goal (call to action)
• sites done entirely in Flash (invisible to iphone users)
• sites that are out of date in terms of content (what they sell, old promotions)

in other cases, we will recommend that you pursue online marketing goals in order to generate revenue and success. If your technology is poor, there may be no way to pursue search engine ranking. It is possible to get around a poorly designed website, however, with paid advertising.

At Stir Solutions, we will create landing pages for your paid advertising campaign and ensure that they are correctly designed and optimized. It is possible to start selling online or generating leads even without the advantage of a visitor-friendly, highly-converting website.

We don't recommend this as a long-term solution. You will need to find the budget to re-create your website using all the best practices in both technology and design.

A favorite success story of ours is the re-creation of the website for International Genealogical Search, Inc. The immediate result was 6 times more quote requests without generating any more web traffic. See the Case Study.

Are you ready to evaluate your site? Contact us today for a free consultation.