EC Stewart Design & Communications

Did you waste your money on a Web site?
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My company recently launched its first Web Site, but we aren't getting any hits. Did we waste our money?

Assuming the Web site is well designed and functional, the answer is NO, you never waste your money on a Web site. There are a number of factors that might cause you to not get many hits, most notably a lack of promotion of the site. The key is to make sure as many people know about your site as possible.

We have had several of our clients come to us with existing sites asking why they are not getting many hits and the first question we ask is what they are doing to let people know about it. Our experience is that most businesses who have a Web site assume that once they are listed on all of the major search engines their customers will be able to find them. Unfortunately this is not the case. If you go to most search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, and type in a search phrase you will often get tens of thousands of responses. Sometimes even typing in the complete name of a company yields page after page of information before your company comes up. This can be even worse when a potential customer is searching under a category of company. An example of this would be if someone was looking for EC Stewart Design and Communications and searched under "design firms in the Raleigh North Carolina area" on Google. The result of the search is over 9,500 related items, 10 to a page, and I have no idea how far down that list our company is.

The key to a successful site is adequate promotion. You need to make sure that both your current and potential customers know about your site and you need to do it in more traditional ways. Several of the best ways are:

Putting your Web address on your business cards and distributing them liberally on bulletin boards, at customer meetings and trade shows and any other time the opportunity might apply. I always make sure to have a supply in my pocket everywhere I go and will give them to just about anyone I talk with. This has lead to a number of new clients for our firm coming from the most unlikely of places including retail store clerks who have a sibling who needs help, artists at shows who need a site and many other opportunities.
Making sure that your Web address is on every piece of paper your company produces from invoices and receipts to packing materials and shipping labels. The more your existing customers see the site address the more they will use it as an information and commerce tool.
It goes without saying that you should make sure as you update collateral materials and sales sheets they include your Web address. This way potential customers will become aware of your site and more familiar with your company as a whole.
Yellow Pages Ads are a great place to promote your site. No matter how much the Web is pervading society, people still go to the yellow pages to find what they're looking for. A listing with your phone number and Web address are relatively inexpensive and can give potential customers the option of either calling or going to the site to find out more information. Assuming that you have a well designed and informative site customers can often get more information there than over the phone.
Speaking of the phone, make sure that anyone who answers the phone at your company knows about the site and can refer callers to it as often as is necessary. If you have regularly scheduled training classes, new product launches or technical support, your staff should know where to point people on the site.
If you own a retail store make sure that your Web address is prominently displayed and that all of your employees know what it is. I was recently in a store that has a newly launched site and none of the employees working at that time knew what the address was. As a result I have no idea how to find them on the Web.

Finally one other thing to consider is your actual domain name (Web address) that you use for your site. Make sure it as close to your company's name as possible. This way people only need to remember the name of your business in order to find you on the Web. If your name is not available as a .com, look and see if maybe you can use one of the other extensions (.net, .biz, .us) is available, or if there is something close that might work as well. Most of the companies through which you can purchase a domain name will give you alternatives if your exact name is unavailable.

All of these are ways to promote your site and make it a very useful tool for your business. Getting large numbers of hits will not necessarily come over night, but with a little promotion and time your site should start seeing more visitors. It is never a waste of money to have a site built for your company, the key is all of the other things you need to do to make people aware of the site and how you use it as a resource for your current and potential customers.

I hope this helps and good luck.

If you have any comments about this column, or have a question you'd like answered, you can write to Andrew Hayden.