CMS Web Solutions

Truth telling and transparency are the new norms on the Internet. Even Google is having a hard time in China stomaching the country’s censorship laws.

The Internet has become a place of information, both good and bad. The truth is being exposed. Hiding a bad company on the Internet is tough.  People write, comment, take pictures and video. Increasingly one of the first things people do when checking out a company on the Internet is to read any available reviews and comments. Sometimes there are a couple unfavourable comments. The funny thing is that most people expect to find a few. But if the vast majority of the comments are good, people we’ll still deal with the company.

Ensure you monitor the comments about your company using Google Alerts (google.com/alerts). Google sends you an email each time someone writes about your company.  Learn from the bad comments; improve processes; become better.

Continuously review your reputation and build it. You won’t have much control over the few times negative comments crop up, so ensure the majority are good ones.

If a salesperson offered to bring in sales for your business for a straight 10% commission, would you take it?  How much would you pay for a full time salesperson?  The answer to both questions would be based on return not cost.

A proper internet strategy, well-built website and on and offline marketing should bring returns far exceeding what one pays for set up and recurring costs. Can you expect to get a good (or even bad) employee for free? The more skills required, the higher the cost.  In fact, during cost cutting periods, employees are often laid off and replaced by technology because it’s cheaper.

So, why not look at your website and internet strategy as an inexpensive employee? The amount you pay will be a lot less than a real person, but your return on investment will be huge. Returns, not cost are what smart businesses look at, both for employees and technology.

Web Design is a profession, like being an accountant, lawyer or engineer. The difference is that currently in this country it is not regulated. Instead the market forces are at work. It’s a wild west out there.

Businesses of all sizes are discovering that websites are more than an online brochure. Their website is a communication hub viewed by prospects, customers, employees, researchers - anyone who is interested. They are discovering that if they do it right, they can have the undivided attention of another person, reviewing information provided by the business. Maybe they’ll even get feedback.

If a business does an effective job of positioning their website on search engines they can capture niche markets from right under the noses of their large competitors. But, Seth Godin, in a recent post identified one of the major issues. He said  “Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity.”

Creating an effective communication hub isn’t about throwing up a simple brochure website. It takes what Seth spoke of. The smart businesses see that. Do you?

Inefficiency in building websites is costing businesses money.

When you’re buying a new home, you bring in a building inspector to examine how the home was built. They have the eyes to see what you don’t. They can see the craftsmanship and where problems may occur in the future.

It’s the same with web design. 80% of a website is behind the surface, in the code. The more skilled a web designer is in their trade, the more they can see. What we are seeing lately is disturbing. Forget not using proper standards, some of the sites built for unsuspecting business owners should be condemned. Sure, they may be pretty on the surface, but wait until you move in for a while.  You’ll find clumsy code that’s slow to load and taking excessive bandwidth. Pages written so poorly and inefficiently that trying to update them takes longer.

Guess who pays for this poor workmanship?  That’s right, the unsuspecting business owner.  Lately, like Mike Holmes, we’ve been getting more and more calls for web design disasters. Calls like “my web designer won’t return my calls”, or “my brother/cousin/friend/student did my company website. They aren’t doing it anymore and it doesn’t work.” What a mess!

Like a home builder, in web design you get what you pay for. If your  website is important to your business, it may be time to do a bit of due diligence when selecting your supplier. Like the saying goes, you can pay me now or pay me even more later.

Each week we get a few calls that go like this “my web design company went out of business/disappeared HELP!” As the economy gets more challenging, one-man web design companies are dropping like flies. Before yours does I suggest you do these 3 things:

Business websites have become much too important not to be taken seriously. Technology needs to be backed up. So does your businesses website and web design company.

The answer is quite simple: It’s were you get the greatest return on your marketing investment. But how do you know where you get your best return? You measure current marketing activity and adjust. If you don’t measure you can’t manage. Marketing is an ongoing process, not a destination. What works today, doesn’t necessarily work tomorrow. You only need to look at the declining state of traditional print advertising.  A growing number of businesses are shifting marketing dollars over to internet marketing. But even they make the mistake of not measuring when a website is a perfect data gathering tool. The smart business people I know measure, whether it’s their business plan, marketing, operations etc. They then review and adjust based on data. As data indicates problem tends, solutions can be implemented. If you struggle measuring use a little saying I’ve been using for years: “if you have a problem, make it a procedure and you won’t have the problem anymore.”

I recently gave a 2 ½ hour seminar entitled “Keys to an effective Business Website” and heard myself utter the words Golden Perspective, a term which I made up years ago. It simply means coming from the audience’s perspective rather than yours. Many in the audience slapped their foreheads when they understood it in the context of web design. It’s vital when optimizing a website for search engines like Google. Ignoring the rule hurts your search results. For example, an automobile dealer might prefer to use the words “pre-owned vehicles” rather than “used cars”. But people search on used cars, not pre-owned cars, so their website wouldn’t come up. So take a closer look at your website and all the places you come in contact with your target audience and review them from the golden perspective.

The thing I love most about computers is that people communicate one-to-one through them no matter where they are in the world. What an incredible opportunity for having someone’s undivided attention! But the internet also makes us speed up. So we need to communicate information faster. Our brains process visuals quicker than words.With most having high speed, video is a wonderful and emerging tool that businesses need to take advantage of. Sounds obvious doesn’t it? So why aren’t more businesses doing it?

It’s time for the brutal truth. 95% of the business websites we see need help. Many not only don’t help a business get sales they drive prospects to the competition. How do I know this? We’re the company working for your competition! The multitude of self proclaimed web designers in Durham (most now out of business) built business websites that are now antiquated and poorly built. Many can actually harm a business. How? Don’t you do research on the Internet and judge a company by its website? Ever not do business with a company with a poor website? Now here’s the tough part. Be honest. If you looked at your website from a visitor’s standpoint, would you buy from you? Like you, your market is migrating to the Internet in droves to do their research. It’s time to take your website strategy more seriously. There I’ve got it off my chest.

Last week CMS Web Solutions Inc. began reselling the services of The Search Engine People (SEP), an Internet marketing firm in Ajax. They are one of Canada’s premier search engine marketing companies with clients such as RIM, ING and Canwest Global just to mention a few. Although SEP have been clients for a number of years now, their target market has been bigger than ours. Recently, they’ve created packages that meet our 5 – 50 employee target market and we agreed to be resellers. What does this mean to our clients? It means that some of the money currently going to off line marketing can shift to where the market is…the Internet. It means clients can go after specific market niches locally and around the world. It means, unlike many offline marketing initiatives, actual data can be extracted and measured, allowing for fine tuning based on fact. Properly built search engine friendly websites need to go hand and hand with well planned and executed Internet marketing strategies. Together, from our little place on the planet, we can now help clients capture new markets that at one time would have been cost prohibitive. What an exciting time to be in business!