Flash animation, fantastic looking graphics, sound effects – all the bells and whistles – tout your web designer’s skills, not yours.  A consistent check of your site usage reports will tell you that the only people returning to the sleek and suave site are other web designers looking for the latest “cool” to imitate, and perhaps you, yourself, admiring the visual effects of your online brochure. Are you trying to win a design award or drive revenue to the business?

If the sites where you book your travel plans, download resources, or find the local and national news suddenly become aesthetically unappealing, you’d still visit them - because you need these sites.  Your consistent visits are based on information and resources provided, not looks, not bells, not whistles - not the latest cool.

Yes, a visually pleasing, professional, corporate looking site is your visitor's first impression of you. But how does it provide credibility that your company can actually bring it. How does it demonstrate that you know what you're doing? There are far too many ugly sites that receive thousands of visits per month. It takes 4 to 5 site visits before a potential customer decides to contact you.  What is it about your site that provokes a repeat visit?  How do your visitors USE your site? What can they come back and do? 

We've heard the excuses that attempt to explain away one's complacency with a poor-performing site (many, many times): “Our industry is different” – “Our company doesn’t work that way”– "We're just a small business" – “There's no way for people to really use our site”.  Keep believing this and your peers and competitors with functional business websites will continue to seduce your clients and potential clients away from you. 

Stop giving your visitors the icing without the cake. We're not suggesting you build an ugly site. But, the first step in addressing the health of your dysfunctional business website is your commitment to creating needs-based content.  "Build it and they will come" doesn't apply here. And yes, anyone, in any industry, can provide a needs-based web site. Do this, and you'll be on the road to recovery.