We’ve got a new website. Who cares?
28th December 2008
After many weeks of concept discussions, white boarding, customer surveying, market research and planning. Several more weeks of content creation, navigation modeling, coding, and final design, we got there. A new website at isocube.co.uk.
It's been a journey, thanks to all the team, great job!
But as the Champaign corks popped, we asked ourselves. Who really cares that we've spent hours, days, weeks, on this marketing project?
Well, we do of course. We're seeing increased visitor numbers, longer average time spent on the site, more enquires, and greater click through rates from search engines. We've already got a number of new customers as a direct result.
We've also had some fantastic feed back from our regular clients. They love the map concept; after all, when embarking on any journey or project, you've got to plan the easiest and quickest route to your desired destination.
But we can shout all we want, publish as many news releases, post as many blog items as we can about the fact, but, to the outside world, to the new visitor, to the prospect wanting marketing assistance, how important is it? Well, not to put to fine a point on it, they don't give a jot. They just want easy access to information. Can we help or not? Our site is just another website, it doesn't matter how new or old it is, our visitors only care if they connect with it!
We develop websites for our customers every week. So finding the time and resource to redevelop our own was a challenge to say the least, But, it has given us all a great experience in being the customer as well as the supplier. It also gave us a chance to double check our methodologies still stood up from both ends of a project, and they did.
Many customers who what a new website look at the site design as being the first element of the project, followed by words and content. To us, the design should come toward the end of the development cycle.
To start there should be lots of questions like:
- What is the purpose of the site?
- Who will be visiting?
- Why will they visit?
- How will they find you?
- Can visitors make enquiries online?
- Can visitors buy online?
Then we may look at the content:
- What is the content going to be?
- What will it look like?
- Who will create it?
- How will visitors navigate to find relevant content?
Only then can we start to plan the site itself. That'll be a rolling cycle of:
- Content creation
- Navigation design
- Testing
Only once these fundamentals start to take shape can we start to look at a design worthy of the site.
And, as a finishing note to this post, just to preserve a piece of the past, below is a little bit of memorabilia from our previous website. It used to sit on our home page.
Drag you mouse across to get the message.
This is great stuff. Now I WANT to make some phone calls!! Thank You.
By Michael on 29th November, 2008
Quite inspiring, Keep up the good work, Thanks for bringing this up
By Website Development in London on 18th December, 2009
The business terms push and pull originated in the marketing and advertising world, but are also applicable in the world of electronic content and supply chain management. The push/pull relationship is that between a product or piece of information and who is moving it. A customer pulls things towards themselves, while a producer pushes things toward customers.
By robert on 23rd December, 2009
First you must know as much as you can about people's needs, human culture, Internet culture. You must know what they want and what they want to hear. But do not do the same mistake that most people do. Some have the charisma but are not honest. Others are honest but do not have the charisma. So you must inspire confidence.
By daneil on 23rd December, 2009
Where else "Push Marketing" uses method to motivate their sales team or channel to deliver the result - e.g. trade promotion, sales incentive and many other aggressive performance driven marketing activities.
By Online Tax Preparation on 02nd January, 2010