Five and a half signs you don’t take your business website seriously

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and Alexia!

You are a small business owner. You don’t have squillions of dollars to spend on broadcast advertising on TV and newspapers and radio. But you do have a website.

Are you taking it seriously?

Here are 5½ signs that you aren’t.

photo credit: kevindooley

1. You host your entire web site (not just the blog) on WordPress.com or Blogger

I already have a post about this, but things are best learned through repetition: using WordPress.com or Blogger or any other hosted blog service may seem like an awesome deal. Free is an awesome deal. For high schoolers and hobbyists, perhaps, but you are a business. You are professional (note: professional doesn’t mean stuffy).

Nothing says “I don’t care about my web site” like hosting it with a free service.

Not only are you at the mercy of the service—for instance, WordPress.com doesn’t like affiliate marketers, and the other services have their own Terms & Conditions that allow them to yank your site without warning—but you have way less flexibility regarding how it looks and than you would if you hosted your own site. You also don’t have control over your domain name (See Item 1½ below). And if WordPress or Blogger decide to ever stop offering free sites, you’re up the creek…

Shell out the $5/month for a good web host and install WordPress or get someone else to do it for you (like me!). It’s never a bad thing to invest in your business. Think of the tax deductions.

1 ½. You don’t have your own domain name

This is sort of a half because it goes with point #1. If you go with a hosted blog service, your web address looks like http://myawesomebiz.wordpress.com.

You don’t have a real address that reads:

My Awesome Business at Snerdly's
(Mr. Snerdly down the way is graciously letting me use this
space in exchange for his name being plastered everywhere)
225 Snerdly St.
Snerdly, SN 39SNRD

So why have a domain name that advertises that you don’t own your own space on the web?

This is a no-brainer. Less than $10/year can secure your very own domain name. I suggest NameCheap.com or Godaddy.com.

2. Your entire site is in Flash

Flash is sooo 2000.

Industries that are notorious for unusable, auto-play-music-laiden, torturously slow to load Flash sites:
Restaurants.
Artists.
Photographers.

Dudes, there is a better way! Really.

You can have all the slick graphics you want without forcing people to listen to Canon in D and sit through l-0-n-g slideshows. Or make people who are out and about on iPhones or non-flash-enabled mobile devices curse when they can’t see your menu. Not to mention, folks can find you with Google! And people can link directly to that mind-blowingly awesome photo you took of those trees!

And the best part? You can edit your site yourself. Quickly. Without having to go into flash and tweak/add/move one tiny thing and then re-export… Or worse: you have to leave it as it is because your web guy has fled to Cuba with the mounds of money you paid for that site.

Come a little ways into this decade. Sites that look good and allow you to edit stuff as you need to and will finally get that search engine traffic you deserve are easy to create. Look no further than WordPress. Did I mention that I can help with that?

3. You have a blog but the last post was six months ago

(related: your contact information is out of date, your copyright statement says 1999, you have “coming soon” or “under construction” badges with those cute little workmen on your site…)

Nothing is sadder than a neglected blog. Except, possibly, for an abandoned kitten.

If you know the benefits of a blog and like to write and can keep up with it along with your other business responsibilities, then go for it. If not, find someone who knows your business and hand it off to them or don’t blog.

You can gasp now.

Instead, use the blog portion of your site as a “news” or “specials” page and for the love of all that is good on the web, don’t use it as your front page.

That said, the benefits of blogging are well worth looking into. Search engines love fresh content. It’s a way to engage your customers on a more regular basis. Blogging also shows people you’re an expert, and gives you a platform to spread your message, your movement and find your right people.

4. No one can figure out what you do, even after clicking the “About” page

I can’t tell you how many “corporate” sites I’ve stumbled on that have slick looking graphics and smiley people in business suits but after 5 minutes on their site (I’m a little persistent when I want to be) I can’t figure out what it is they do.

How are people going to know what you do if you don’t tell them in plain english?

Think about it this way: how long do you spend on a web site looking for what it’s about? Three seconds? Five? If you don’t find the information quickly, you leave, right? Because you have better things to do than sit around and hunt for information that should be front and center.

Your site visitors are exactly the same.

Add a tagline to your site’s header. Something that says in a few words exactly what it is you do. Avoid jargon like the plague. Make sure a 9-year-old can understand it. Mine is “WordPress Coaching and Consulting for the Terminally Busy.” Be Awesome Online’s, of course, is “Website advice for delightful weirdos”.

5. You use jargon, industry-speak and stilted business language in your copy

You are human. Act like one. Write like one.

Forget everything you learned in school about writing “proper” English. Business writing is for people in suits who push around seventy gazillion dollars at a time and don’t need to explain what it is they do.

But you are a very small business. And you interact with your customers one-on-one. And they need to know you’re a real person. They need to see your personality because that’s what draws them to you.

And forget about serving “everyone” or being afraid of turning off people just because you are real in your web copy. The people who most resonate with what you say and what you do and how you say it will be the most awesome, amazing and grateful customers you ever have. So be yourself.

If I ruffled your feathers or stepped on your toes or harassed/bothered/annoyed you in any other way, I did my job. I want to see you be the best you can be not only in your own local area where you do business, but on the web, too.

So… if any of these 5 ½ points is you, what are you going to do about it? Tell us in the comments!