Is your website costing you money?
A website can cost its owner money in two ways: It can cause you to actually spend more money to maintain, or it can limit the amount of potential revenue your company can make.
Realizing your site is costing you money is the first step in putting an end to it. Coming to this realization can be a difficult process; it takes reexamining fundamental, and often long-held, beliefs about your company, brand, site, audience, and technology. The English author Samuel Johnson said it best: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken”; it’s important not to allow yourself to be chained to beliefs, technologies, or memes. Reexamination is key to innovation. So, I’ve given you two ways in which your website might be costing you money; let me break these down further:
It causes you to spend more money
Time suck: Time suck sites require their owners to spend more time than necessary to take care of them. Sites that require you to make weekly updates or don’t make use of scheduled content can be an indication of time suck sites.
Solutions:
- CMS scheduling software
- User generated content publishing
- Aggregated content from social media
Inconvenient: The inconvenient site requires special passwords or limits access based on location. The inconvenient site requires its owner to spend more time, or spend time in a prescribed manner. It also costs its owner money by putting constraints on its users.
Solutions:
- Open ID (RPX NOW)
- VPN Access
- Cloud-based services
Wrong Technology: The site built on wrong technology causes most of the upfront over-spending. Building systems from scratch can be good for the developer, but bad for the owner; often, proprietary solutions are hard to update and cost a lot upfront. Additionally, using wrong technology can cause a site to become a time suck site down the road; requiring its owner to compensate for distributed content systems, CMS rules, and social networking tools.
Solutions:
- Open Source Tools - wordpress, posterous, twitter, Dot Net Nuke
- Google Checkout
- Google Analytics
It limits your revenue
Hard to use: Usability is considered by many to deliver the highest ROI on existing sites. Ensuring a site is easy to use can make the difference between being an industry leader and scraping the bottom of the barrel. Usability & user experience should extend past the borders of your site into all digital touchpoints.
Solutions:
- Tree Testing
- Card Sorts
- Persona Development
- Usability Testing
- Ethnographic Studies
- User Flows
Hard to find: You can have the easiest to use site, but if your users can’t find it you’re in trouble. Not ranking in search engines is one of the biggest indications you need to reexamine how people are finding your site.
Solutions:
- SEO
- SEM
- Media Buy
- Social Media Marketing
Irrelevant: Seemingly obvious, sites that are irrelevant should be discontinued. The idea of keeping sites around because they represent brand equity is a great argument, but when those sites damage the brand, confuse the user, or cannibalize search terms it’s no longer worth keeping alive.
Solutions:
- Create a communications plan that updates stale content on a regular basis
- Integrate with social media
- Create a platform for users to communicate with each other
Disassociated: Disassociated websites often happen when branding agencies and digital agencies are disconnected. Disassociated branding, messaging, or offerings can cause confusion, frustration, or dissidence.
Solutions:
- Encourage user feedback and provide multiple channels to receive feedback
- Schedule quarterly reviews of campaigns across all mediums and look for inconsistencies
I’ve audited 74 sites over the past 3 months, and 67 of them are costing their owners money in obvious ways. All of these sites I was given unrestricted access to their metrics, administration systems, and database configurations. I was also provided with information on social media management processes and guidelines. It’s unfortunate that approximately 90% of the site’s I gained access to are costing their owners serious amounts of money; but I think it shows progress that they are willing to reexamine their sites. The fact that they’re open to being audited makes me think “the chains of habit” aren’t yet too strong to be broken.
