Blogging Online News Articles Information

Five Good Reasons to Can Your Small Business Website

Most small and medium size bricks and mortar businesses now have websites. That’s a good thing, right?

It depends.

Let’s face it. Most business websites are a waste of electricity and bandwidth.

Here are my top five reasons why you need to can your website:

1. Unclear purpose.

Why did you create or pay someone to create a website for your business? Because everyone says you need a site? To sell your products or services? To handle customer service?

If you don't have clear objectives as to what you wish to accomplish with your website, you can be sure your visitors won't have a clue.

2. No content worth reading.

Free information is the coin of the Internet realm. Visitors who stumble upon your site don't care about your company history, your mission statement, or a group photo of your staff from the last Christmas party.

Your site concentrates on telling everyone what a wonderful company you are without answering the visitors real question: "What's in it for me?".

3. Content has not been updated in months or years.

Why should I trust you or your company to have the latest or greatest product or service if the information is not current?

Old content tells me this business thinks of a website as a cheap billboard or brochure and not as a way to assist it's customers.

If you don't have the time to keep your site current, or the funds to pay someone to update it for you, get rid of it. You are just paying for hosting a site no one needs.

4. One way communication.

If your customers are local, they need a way to communicate with your company. Websites are an increasingly archaic way to satisfy customer service needs in an era of blogs, forums, autoresponders, and instant messengers.

Why does your company not give me a way to complain publicly, as in an open forum? What are they afraid of? How many others have had problems with their products or services?

5. Difficult to access your site.

For some reason, many small and even big businesses want visitors to register before they allow access to any useful information.

Wrong.

If you want my name and email address, you better have a good reason for me to give up my contact info.

Have you earned by trust? Are you giving me a valuable, free ebook on a topic I am interested in? Do you have a privacy policy posted on each page so I can be sure you are not about to spam me with ads?

What you really need is a blog.

OK. A blog is technically a website, but for a small business, it solves 95% of your website problems.

First, to update your blog, all you need to be able to do is click and type. Your blog is updated instantly with your latest information showing first. No need to pay a website designer for anything.

Second, your customers and visitors can post comments to your blog giving your valuable feedback about your products or services.

Third, you can moderate comments to your blog so that constructive criticism stays while venom is deleted. You want honest feedback. Also, solving problems for customers concerned enough to contact you online will answer questions other customers may have but who are too timid to ask.

WordPress, an open source (free) blogging platform, offers many other plugins and options for the business owner:

- hundreds of free templates online

- ability to change templates in seconds

- a complete control panel to manage your blog

- automatic archiving of your older posts and articles

- posts are easy for the search engines to index

- built-in blogroll and easy to manage links

- more optional features too numerous to mention

Search engines love blogs because their content is updated more frequently than the average website. Anything you can do on your old website can be done on your blog - better.

Dump your website. If you insist on having a website, leave it as an orphan or archive and link to it from your new blog.