3 Real Life Examples of How Having a Decent Website Can Really Improve Your Business

Having a decent website really can improve your business. We have three examples of clients or Ready Steady Websites® members who we have worked with where they noticed an immediate impact of having a decent website.

Having a poor website can be detrimental to your business.

Many people have the attitude that they’ve got a website, it might not be great but at least it’s there and people will find it and get in touch. Wrong! Having a poor website can be losing you business. If you have a terrible website that looks rubbish and doesn’t work properly it will put people off working with you. A simple holding page with an email address is better than a bad website.

We worked with a construction firm who had a really out of date website. It had been built by a friend, it wasn’t well planned or designed and hadn’t been kept up to date with new images or examples of work. It was just sitting there.

While we worked on their new website, we took their old website down because it was doing nothing for them. We replaced it with a holding page that had the company name, what they did, that a new website was coming soon and an email address to get in touch. That holding page got them an enquiry in a matter of days. More interest than their poor website had got them in months.

That holding page looked professional and showed that the company was investing time and money in a new website which meant they took their business seriously. Putting that image out there made someone want to work with them. I hate to think how many potential customers they put off with their old website.

If you’re not sure whether your website is up to scratch or not, check out last week’s blog post 3 Tips to Help You Answer the Question, Is My Website Good?

Having no website at all means you are missing customers.

We have two examples of this.

The first is of a stationery designer who we have been working with. She used to have a website and she wasn’t happy with it. It didn’t reflect her brand or the quality of her work and she made the decision to start again and take her website down before we had built her new one. She understood that having a bad website was bad for the image of her business. During this time she didn’t have a website but was actively still in business through social media.

We worked with her through the Ready Steady Websites® Do It For You Service to create her website. We had just put the website live when she sent us an excited message saying she hadn’t realised the website was live and that she had just had an enquiry through it! It hadn’t been live for any time at all. We were still doing the final checks on it before we sent her the email to say it was live. The website was that engaging though that probably the first person who saw it made contact with her. That’s the power of a beautiful website with clear call to action buttons!

The second example is of a local builder who was adamant he didn’t need a website because all his work came from word of mouth. A family member of his was already a Ready Steady Websites® member and she convinced him to let her use one of our templates to build him a website and he was glad he did!

He has been getting lots of online leads since his website went live and he said he “never thought a website would generate this much work”. He has also had compliments on his website by other trades people. This might just seem like a nice thing, but it’s key when you work in an industry where projects have lots of different people with different specialisms working on them. Those trades people, now they have been impressed by his website, will remember him more and more work might come his way through them because of it.

Every touch point you have with a potential customer or business contact is important and you need to make a good impression with all of them, so don’t let your website or lack of it let you down.

If you have now realised that you need a new website, but you’re not sure where to start then take a look at how Ready Steady Websites® works and our templates. You might also want to check out our Perfectly Planned Website Course, to start you on the right path.

Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash