That's right. Your method, behavior and strategy you are now using to manage your website may be justifiable reasons to stop it as soon as possible.
Right now, there are millions of websites on the Internet, many of them are dead static pages with not or very few visitors. The owner of websites are paying lots of money and effort to make the website up and running and are giving service to visitors. From within these much of website owners, a little of them are earning money from their website or their website is beneficial for their business, most of the others are wasting their time and money.
However if you do not have a web site on the Internet, your business is under a very serious risk to be bypassed by your competitors, but if you are not running your website in a right way, then it would not only be a useless but also a threat to your whole business. If you ask why, just read just five more important reasons that you have to stop your website.
1-Your website is not well designed.
People trust to their eyes more than their other senses. So, if your small website is not well designed, it is crowded, bad colored and improperly written text, so they might think that your real store or your office should also be something like that. Having technical problems like JavaScript error messages, run time errors on loading pages, slow page download, useless graphics and flash animations are also factors that should be considered.
2-Your website is not up-to-date.
If you have put old and obsolete data and content on your website and you do not pay enough time to make it up-to-date, then how visitors could trust on your knowledge. How could you prove you and your team's knowledge is not obsolete too? There are millions of websites that deliver very new information and are updated daily or even hourly. Visitors would not tolerate with old content. If they reach to useless and out of date information on your web site, then they leave your website to visit your competitors' web site.
3-You do not reply your e-mails regularly and without delay.
If you do not pay enough attention to your website visitors and their e-mails, then you may have the same manner in your real world business with your customers. Replying e-mail is the simplest routine that you should have put in your daily tasks. You are not expected to reply e-mail immediately. Replying every 24 or even 48 hours is also acceptable. If you delay in response, then your competitors would win in reaching hopeless visitors that have sent you a price quote weeks ago and still are waiting. Even they have not received a simple auto responder to be sure you have received their e-mail.
4-Your website is not optimized for search engines.
So, all your potential clients that search for your services and products would be captured by your competitors who have invested to be on top in search engines. If you are paying a lot of money for your website hosting, design and support, if you make your website content up-to-date and pay time and energy to reply your e-mails, but have not a good ranking in major search engines, then you are losing your money. Being visible in the huge world of Internet is vital for your online business and search engines are very useful for this purpose. However, you should target your audiences in many other promotional methods rather than search engines, like, banner ads, e-zines, e-books, articles, forums and newsletters.
5-Insufficient information and facilities in your website.
If you have not mentioned your complete postal and contact address or you have not included price list of your services and products on your website, then you won't be able to capture visitor's interest. No pricing information means no path for decision. Visitors decide on many parameters, price is the most important one. Besides, a very intuitive shopping cart that could be easily managed and online credit card processing with security considerations would be the next thing your visitors would search for on your website. Not having these items, better to stop your website.
There are lots of reasons you could find in articles that having a website is vital for your business. There are also check points that you can follow to make a good website. You can use those check points to run a very successful web site to help your business and who knows, you may some day stop your real world business and just rely on your website, like many other businesses that you can find them just on the Internet. eBay, Amazon and Yahoo!. But if you are deciding to have a successful business online, you have to consider that not having set a strategy for your online business means losing reputation, money, energy and resources both on your online and real business.
This article tried to make you aware that, some day you may reach to a point for a hard decision that is, stopping your website or your very expensive website just because of your incorrect management methods. Hope you never see that day.
About The Author
Mahmood Bashaash is the owner of SGNetway Company in web address of www.sgnetway.com which is focused on developing web sites and web applications and is the author of MahmoodB web site and newsletter that reveals hundreds of killer Internet marketing tips and tricks. To access his articles, visit: http://www.mahmoodb.com; mahmoodb@sgnetway.com