If you're one of the people in your organisation who is responsible for your website, then you'll probably agree with my assertion that new websites only make you happy twice.
- Once when you sign the agreement to commission a new one
- Once when it's just launched.
The rest of the time, they are just a pain in the butt, and a load more balls to juggle, and the only escape comes when you either commission a new one or quit the job.
So if you’re aware that right after the initial endorphin rush, you're going to have a whole world of complexity, additional workload, fear of getting it wrong, cat herding, overspend and anxiety, why on earth do you want a new website?
I’m going to give you 5 reasons why you want a new website, to remind you of the upside in all of this. But I’m also going to give you a corresponding set of ways to make sure you get it right. Getting it right gives you the elusive third opportunity for happiness - that you are celebrated as some kind of marketing genius within your organisation for delivering the new site on time, on budget and that it makes a difference to your sales and profitability.
1 | Better conversion
This is the one you’d expect to see, so had to get it in there before you click off. It’s true that a new website can do this, but you have to do more than want it. You need to ask yourself, and your agency of choice what they are actually going to do in order to make better conversion happen. You can look at your HubSpot dashboard all you like, but if you’ve not properly considered what better conversion means, you’re just ticking a box.
Conversion comes from the original marketing mindset of intercepting and interpreting needs, and adapting the offering (and how you talk about it) accordingly. We use a raft of very honed SEO & Keyword Audits plus any amount of primary research with your students and agents, to get an accurate set of conversion variables. Then the fun can really start when we specify these into the new build project.
More: How to measure your website performance to boost sales
2 | Website merge
If you’ve been one of those organisations that historically has created a new website for a new business area, then it might be time to pull it all back under one roof. The trend towards microsites - a satellite website strategy - started in the early 2000s, and was often driven by search engine optimisation ambition. But it’s so resource intensive, it fractures your brand, and you end up competing with yourself for positioning. Speaking of brand…
3 | Rebrand
Is it a rebrand, or have you just realised that the current website doesn’t reflect who you actually are? If so, you’re not alone.
First, there’s a difference in my mind between brand and branding. Brand is the totality of the experience people get of your organisation, whichever touchpoints they use. Branding is the imagery, fonts, logos, colours deployed to represent your brand.
Website agencies are generally great at taking your brand book and employing it more or less creatively to give you a fresh look. A consultancy like ours will seek to use that same brand book, but create something which is a reflection of who you all are, and what it feels like to study with you.
However pretty, a fresh look, particularly if your agency uses a template website, will feel dated possibly by the time it goes live. If you put time into understanding your brand, the new site could still work for you 10 years from now.
More: Branding: Make sure your brand values are sincere
4 | Easier to use for staff
If you want your next website to be a dream to add content to, you’ll need to specify that at the outset. That means dipping a toe into the world of content management systems (CMS), whilst leaving your boots and baggage at the door.
We’ve all had good and bad experiences of every kind of CMS going. It’s always down to how you use the CMS.
A good agency will take the time to really understand what you’ll truly be doing to the site after it goes live. Work through this, and you’ll get a CMS you actually love. No, really (that’s what we do).
More: Custom CMS happy ending story
5 | Connects everything together
However shiny the exterior of your brand and your organisation, the chances are you’re still using Excel spreadsheets, bits of paper and bulldog clips round the back to hold your operation together. It’s OK. We’re not going to tell anyone.
The allure of a new website that joins it all together seamlessly is totally enticing. Here’s that vision - your course and operations management software sends price info to the live site, and even alerts users to when courses are filling and full. You’ll naturally exaggerate the ‘filling up’ label to get people to book. Whatever. You see where people have left the site, you capture their data when they fill a form and download a thing, and the system automatically adds them to the relevant emailing list and they fall into the customer relationship management (CRM) system to be hounded until they book or die. Course feedback you collect is sanitised, and appears against relevant courses with their photo or video, and new blog articles almost write themselves based on what enquiries and questions you’re getting. You’re living the dream.
And then the alarm goes off. If you ask for all this in one go, chances are you’ll be spending too much money finessing the software integration and you’ll be pushing the go live date way down the road.
And here are 5 reasons why you should hold off getting a new website:
- You're personally bored with the current site
- Your competitors have changed theirs, and you like theirs more
- You think your website is underperforming, but you have no proof
- You want conversion to be higher, but you're not able to invest specifically to make this happen
- A quick website flip will boost positioning out of the box.
When you work with us, we help you to smell the coffee, get a sense of priority and manage your budget, whilst getting as many efficiency wins as possible. We don’t muck about.
