Is your outdated web site fumbling on key info exchanges?
D. Matt Scherer
I help those traveling on their personal transition highway capitalize on LinkedIn and its networking power to advance their lives and careers
My brother, his wife and I were lost near our former home earlier this summer, trying to find the street address of my father's nursing home. Instead of going to a map or asking someone for directions, we went to our mobile phones to find the nursing home's phone number.
We had the name of the nursing home and we found the web site. Because the nursing home had an outdated web page, we couldn't find the address or phone number.
This is what a lot of my web site friends and vendors would term as scatty user interface. The nursing home, part of a chain of facilities that provide care for elderly folks like my dad, had not updated their web site to make it mobile friendly.
Mobile marketing gains a lot of buzz from people who think they know what they are doing for their customers. They remind me of some former Air Force public relations colleagues who talked a great game but couldn't do the job.
If you want to avoid these kind of people in updating your web site to embrace mobile sites, ask them these simple questions.
Question #1: How does my web information look on an iPhone or Android device? If your web site looks klunky after an update is completed, it's time to find someone who understands the software that can build a better site.
Question #2: What are the things people need right away? Getting the phone number for a business or a correct address should form the foundation for any web update. A smart web user interface person should know about these key elements.
Question #3: How does my site rank on search engines? More importantly, does my web guy know the updates in the Google search algorithm penalize content that isn't mobile friendly.
Question #4: Is my business or organization telephone number easy to find? And better yet, does it provide a link that allows someone to call a business.
Question #4a.1: When a person reaches a business or organization, does the person answering the phone act professional when taking a phone call? And more importantly, can they give someone good directions.
If your current web site provider has that glazed, lost in the headlight look after you ask these questions, it's time to get a new person to manage this.
Engineer, Innovator, & Author. Inspired to create kids STEAM books like "Exploring Smart Cities for Kids,""Goodnight Moon Base"
9 年Thanks for the checklist of questions, Matt! For many years, my attitude has been that if a business owner doesn't care enough to have a professional and convenient website, with simple basics like you described, I need to move on and find someone else. If you make it hard for me to find your address and/or phone number, how much do you care about getting and serving new customers? Achieving professional and satisfactory answers to these questions used to take a professional website developer, and still can benefit from one if you have extensive requirements and vision. Fortunately now there are also many plug-and-play drag-and-drop website building tools and services available which have responsive designs (meaning they automatically adapt to whatever device the person is viewing it on). So there's no excuse not to "get with the program" in my mind.