So What Can a Website Do for You?
November 2011
The most obvious and simplest role a website can play is as an online marketing brochure. Since everyone is connected these days, a website is as necessary as a business card. It can be a place to showcase your products and services, communicate your personality and vision, and provide housekeeping items like your address and contact information. In its simplest form, you would send people to your website through personal or social media connections.
If you want your website to take a more active role in 'finding' and attracting people to buy or join, you will need to do the things that make a website visible to both people and search engines like Google search. This will take an ongoing effort along specific lines particular to your audience and industry. These include proper coding of the website infrastructure, and regular updates to the content of your site and to an appropriate social media platform.
Websites can be much more than static pages for people to look at. As you know they can be shopping centers, libraries and forums for discussion. You can have a private website that just you and your staff and/or clients use for task management and file sharing. Event calendars, teaching environments, photo portfolios, polls and surveys, newsletter signups; these are some of the ways that websites are used to accomplish a variety of objectives.
And don't forget the mobile web experience. The purchase of mobile devices to interact with the internet surpassed the purchase of desktop computers in late 2010, two years earlier than predicted! No, you don't have to develop special web pages or mobile apps to reach a mobile audience. I can offer a viable solution in the form of "Responsive Design," a way of coding your website that makes it more readable on mobile phones and tablets.