Technology is the basis for most 21^st century marketing activities, and a great website is worth its weight in gold. Your website, including any lead generation or conversion apps that you are using on it, becomes a critical hub for marketing success, and it is the primary way to increase ROI from your total marketing investment. A smooth and predictable website experience will amplify your ROI – and that’s not just true for e-commerce sites.

If you are thinking about building a new website, I have three recommendations:

1. Build a quality website (not a DIY site);
2. Choose the tools you will be using before building the website; and
3. Maintain your website well.

Here’s why each of these is crucial to a 21^st Century Marketing Program:

Build a quality website

These days, website creation tools that make it seem easy and inexpensive to create a website are included with many hosting platforms, and the templates they use are aesthetically appealing. But beware, because these “inexpensive” DIY solutions rarely ever give you the ability to integrate the tools you will need to really up-level your marketing program without significant additional cost. My advice is to find a great website development company and pay to have your website built for you the right way. Use WordPress if you want to maintain the content on your own. Trust me, you don’t want to hear that you need to rebuild your website or you cannot use the tools that really propel your business. Sadly, I’ve had to have this discussion with too many business owners.  

Choose your tools before building your website

It helps if your developer knows about the tools you want to integrate into your website before they start their work. That way they can plan for a smoother integration and make sure the tools work optimally. If you ask about a new tool after the site is built, a good developer can integrate it, but it may take more time and be more difficult than if the developer knew about your plan beforehand. A bit of preplanning goes miles in the end.

Maintain your website well

Updating and maintaining your website is critical for security. No one wants a data breach or to deal with a hacked website. I highly recommend that you try to stick with the same developer for updates, since they will know your site best. Plugins make it easy to update a website, but they can also cause conflicts when added or updated. It’s best to have a technical person update the site so they can anticipate potential issues and address any that arise. Otherwise, your site – or features on it – could be down for days as you wait to get on a developer’s schedule to look at and fix anything that breaks.

Are you thinking about building a new website? Email us at info@foresightperformance.com for a free list of the things to consider when building a website.