As a Point-of-Entry Marketing agency, we encourage our clients to connect with their customers in all the ways they interact with their business, including their website.

But if a company’s website isn’t designed with the end-user in mind, it can confuse and even annoy current or potential customers.

In their Get to the Point newsletter, MarketingProfs quotes Jonathan Kranz: “There may be nothing particularly ‘wrong’ about the design, the underlying coding, or even the writing, but these websites aren’t right, because they fail to connect with customers in any meaningful way.”

When your company developed its website, did the team consider how it would be used by your target audience? Kranz notes that many companies start their web efforts “by reviewing their competitors’ sites,” and arbitrarily emulating or ignoring content or applications without concrete data on the sites’ performance. By focusing on the way your audience will interact with your company on the web, you can create an experience that differentiates you from your competitors.

Kranz also asks “how will your site relate to [social networking destinations]?”  The website design and development experts at our in-house web company, WebArt, constantly reinforce the idea that a website is a living, breathing part of your marketing strategy. In order to draw the attention of search engines consistently, the content must be updated frequently. And whether the new content is an article, a weekly blog posting, or the addition of new inventory to your e-commerce site, share those changes through your social networking accounts to drive traffic back to your site. 

Finally, 65% of the population consider themselves visual learners, so it’s only natural to get caught up in the look of your website, but as a writer, I’m always inclined to write first and design second. Kranz points out, “no one in her right mind would design a book cover, select a binding, and create an index before actually writing the book itself.” And, as our in-house designer will tell you, the end design is much more effective when the copy comes first.

If you’re re-thinking your business’s web presence, check out some additional tips here and here.