Websites Are Dead: 10 Reasons Why You Need an Online Business

In today’s fast-paced world, it can be difficult to keep up, especially with the ever-changing Web. Just about everyone has a website these days, making it all the more difficult for yours to be effective.

So what about the old-fashioned, static, five-page website of the late 90s?

Is it dead?

Is there no use for it anymore?

Decide for yourself after taking a look at the tools that are being implemented today for an effective site:

1. Repeated Interest

To have an effective Web site, you have to have something that draws visitors back time and time again. Having the same static information displayed for months and years means that you will only have one-time visitors at best, and a decline to zero at worst.

To generate interest for returning visitors, blogs, forums, news, announcements, or something that’s updated regularly is required in order to bring people back.

The more individuals see your content updating, the easier they can get into a habit of checking your site. Sitting stagnant for too longs leaves your site susceptible to being forgotten.

2. A Loyal Community

Once your content begins to attract visitors, the next important step is to build a loyal following. Insightful information, interest building, events, community forums, and the like are just a few ways to can start building a community.

One important element to building your community is engaging your readers. If you have a blog built into your site, encourage your readers to comment.

If you have a forum, encourage them to begin conversations that could interest other readers to jump in. Creating avid readers isn’t difficult, it just takes some creativity.

3. An Online Storefront

Though it may not fit the mold of every Web site, an online shop is a terrific way to gain site traffic. In combination with site features listed previously, it could be the single most powerful element for producing you direct revenue.

With the automation of today’s online shopping systems, you can make a sale without ever knowing it. Online shops have the power and flexibility to process payment, calculate shipping, and even offer incentive programs to keep customers coming back for more.

Offer this with helpful customer service and experienced information, and you have a winning combination.

If you have an online shop, Customer Management can also help you to track your spending habits. View reports and narrow down what items customers purchase in correlation with other products. You can use this information to help you build cross-selling effectively into your store.

4. Effective SEO

You may be familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization. If not, in a nutshell, it is the process of streamlining your Web site to quickly get picked-up and recognized by top search engines such as Google®, Yahoo®, Bing®, and more.

Dynamically updating content, site-maps, effective keywords, are just a few  things that can help improve your SEO. A powerful website management system will have SEO tools built in.

5. Site Analytics and Reporting

The power to track the progress of your site is essential. A good set of analytics will enable you to track how many people are visiting your site, where they’re visiting from, and the keywords they’re typing in to reach your site.

Along with this, you should be able to create reports, which enable you to track where you need to improve, and the progress you’ve made in increasing traffic and sales.

6. CMS and Web Forms

Keeping tabs with the individuals who visit your site is another key to having a powerful website. An integration between your Web forms, such as a “contact us” form, enables you to organize who’s contacting you, when they’re contacting you, and other things they’ve done on your site.

Long forgotten are the days of an inbox full of unrelated, “Contact Us” form submissions. With a good CMS built in, you can do it all in one place, being more efficient in the process.

7. Easy and Flexible Content Management

As mentioned previously, regularly updated content is important for any website. With a built in content management system, you’re able not only to make changes to your site without knowing how to code (HTML), but also you can add, edit, and delete content in a fraction of the time.

Many of today’s content management systems make it a breeze to add photos, stream content, and save drafts, just like you would on your word processing application.

Spot a typo on one of your pages? No problem. With a content management system you can go in and change it yourself within moments rather than digging through lines of code or contacting your Web developer.

8. Photos, Examples, and Multimedia

The more examples you can show, the better. We are in a time that is flooded with video, music, pictures, and more, so keeping interest can be difficult. A good Web site will enable you to easily update video content, photos, and more to keep the interest of potential visitors.

9. Web Apps and Database Management

Along with regularly updated content of your pages, there is the convenience of streamlining the type of information you give to your readers and customers.

A way to do this is through a Web App (or Web Application) that would enable you to have custom forms developed to capture the information you need.

For example, if you had an extensive list of books you wanted to keep track of for your book club, you could fill in the custom fields of your Web App, and have that information instantly appear on your Web site for all to see. Even more, capture customer and reader interest by allowing them to have their own entries, with your moderation.

10. Team Management and Administration

Along with the things mentioned previously is the importance of being able to collaborate with and manage others who help you work on your website. From customer cases and support, to complete moderation of visitor-entered content, keeping your whole team in the loop is a must.

What Do You Think?

Feel free to leave us a comment to let us know what you thought about this article, or your experience with with this topic. We would love to hear from you!

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Thomas McGee

As a designer and developer at WinePress Publishing, Thomas specializes in book jackets, websites, illustrations, and advertisements.

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