Why you should recruit a new website

06 July 2007 - By Sean Fishlock

Do you look at your IT spend and ponder the real value of your website ? Well don't. As I'll explain, a website costs a lot less than full time sales staff, but build an e-business website and you add the equivalent of several key people to your team that never have to appear on the payroll.

Most sites on the web are little more of an information brochure. They function as a tool rather than a resource. These types of websites are cost generators rather than cost reducers. They sit there costing you money to host and update and you almost think to yourself "what is the point ?" and "should I even bother at all ?".

Many small businesses think that this is all their website can become. There are all sorts of ways of measuring clicks and hits but the real measure is how well your website your goes hand in hand with your business. But every business can benefit, regardless of size, just by thinking about your website a little differently.

If these scenarios describe you, then consider this. I don't have to tell you that staff cost a lot of money. But you don't have to continually spend on your website it to take it to the next level. A website can have benefits right across your business. All it takes is a little professional development on your ordinary website to consistently become employee of the month. I'll explain.

The best thing about websites is that if designed properly, they can be as versatile as any member of your staff. A website can be an efficient lead generator, it can close the easy deals, it can measure and track brand awareness, juggle different roles and best of all help cut costs.

Lets look at some of the ways a website works as part of your team.

A website can take help with:

Marketing

Most people who think of websites as brochures know that websites have something to do with marketing. But done properly, a website offers the astute business owner a lot more. A website can be an efficient lead generator. It can strongly reinforce your brand. These days, you can measure the success of internet marketing better than many other mediums. Tapping into the power of e-marketing initiatives such as email marketing enables you to reduce your mailing costs. Websites can now deliver things such as video and blogs which can influence consumer behaviour. You'll need a strategy in place which includes the website as a key form of promotion, but a website makes a great marketing assistant.

Public Relations

A good website is like a PR assistant. It can enable you to communicate and distribute press releases quickly and easily. It can both instill customer loyalty and generate publicity. All without assistance from IT. A good, easy to use content management system is the key.

Sales

An effectively designed website can become an essential member of your sales team. It can help you to warm and qualify potentials, it can integrate with your Customer or Member Management software to track the progress of new business in your sales process, and it can even close many of the easy deals.

Customer Service

A good informative website reduces a significant amount of time spent answering phones and email, and this means money. An extranet can perform customer service tasks 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

Information Management

A website can help you to secure your important data or leverage your intellectual property. A content management powered website should have automated systems in place for ensuring that information stays current and relevant. It can co-ordinate collaboration of multiple staff working on documents and encourage information reuse reduce redundant content and data.

You shouldn't need a techie to change some text or images on your website or to install it on your server. A website with content management frees you from costly website updates, and reliable hosting takes away the hassle of dealing with your internal IT guys.

Human Resources

A website can promote new career opportunities with your organisation and be a means to capture job applications and help you to process them. Your company intranet could be a website that can streamline internal communications, capture knowledge, initiate new staff and imporove productivity. The intranet can help maintain staff morale which in turn reduces staff turnover.

Printing

A good informative website It can also reduce significant printing costs, but it needs to be easy to find and pages need to be able to be printed easily.

Other Roles

There are many other roles which your website can help fill. For a large business, this can help reduce staff and increase efficiency. For a smaller business, your website can help you by add "virtual staff", assisting you to grow your business and gain a real competitive advantage.

A key part of your team

Now lets look at the benefits of a website over a staff member. While a staff member can sometimes slack off, your website works tirelessly for your business and never asks questions. And while people tend to be specialised in these areas, a website is one member of staff that can do everything. It can take on almost any new task you assign it.

So to be truly effective, your website needs to be streamlined with your business. This means a flow of information from your Intranet to your Website and Extranet so that your customers become yet another cog in the money machine.

In e-business, we call this integration, and once you see the potential, with proper planning and strategy, your website can be the conduit to bring it all together.

We have had some fantastic success stories with websites that feature integration from customers that have begun to think in exactly this way. For example, one of our customers managed to make up to 10 roles redundant after the implementation of their website. Another customer was able to turnover $1 billion worth of business with less than five staff. Another custsomer still was able to generate $5,000 worth of donations on the first day of the launch of their revamped website.

Appraising a website's performance is a different story, which I'll cover soon.