Blogs

Great news - your website just converted another visitor!

Joe Martin of Mount Manganui, Tauranga, New Zealand, just filled out your contact form and is interested in purchasing one of your products. He's provided his full name, email address and phone number, plus a brief outline of his requirements.

Now what?

The purpose of most business websites is to generate sales leads. But what businesses do with those leads can vary wildly:

As a website development company, our focus is on helping our customers to drive more visitors to their website, and on ensuring the website converts those visitors to leads.

The cool thing about this process is that a well-designed website provides you with very detailed information about the sources of those visitors, what search terms they used to find you, what they did on the site, and what pages they visited before converting.

If you run a business in New Zealand, you probably either have a website, or are thinking about getting one.

There's a good chance you're also considering extending your web presence to setting up an eCommerce store. After all, there's a lot to be said for being able to sell your stuff online. Your store is always open, meaning you can make sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You also don't have to worry about paying sales commission - or sales people.

Sounds great, right? But where do you start?

If you are considering getting a website (or having one built for you), you have two basic options when choosing the development technology you'll use:

1. Hand code the website using HTML, Javascript, CSS and other technologies
2. Use a content management system (CMS)

Making the right choice is a critical early step in getting a new website. If you're in a hurry, and just want my opinion (and the opinion of most smart website developers) about which option you should choose, the answer is 2. Hands down.

Does your website have a contact form?

A contact form is a must-have for any website. Not just a contact page, mind you, but a real, working contact form that someone can fill in and submit.

A lot of websites have just a contact page with some contact details such as an address, phone number and an email by which someone can contact them. This is both a mistake, and a huge missed opportunity.

Putting your email address on your website is a Very Bad Idea.

Our free website audit service is proving very popular with businesses who have paid a lot for a website but feel that they aren't getting the return on investment they were led to expect by their website designer.

Yet, when we ask these customers how much traffic their website is getting, the answer is often a variation of "I don't have a clue". Even more scary, we even run into website developers who give the same answer, but we'll save that for a blog post all of its own.