Jasmine Web Starter

Whatever the size of your business or the sector you are in, todays common trend seems to be rising costs, which are going up every few days for just about everything!

Which got us thinking, "How can a website help to offset these costs and increases in business?" This thinking quickly lead us onto a few areas and questions:

Area of interest to explore

Does it say & do enough?

Can the website cut down customer service requests, freeing up this time for other tasks?

Does it answer common asked questions?

Highlight opening times?

Do I promote my current offers, new product lines or services clearly, and in a timely manor on the website?

Keeping it fresh?

When was the content last updated, and how does a customer know its up to date?

Does it take too long to get new content online, maybe that new section is still waiting on content?

Do you find it too confusing to update content?

How quickly can you react to change with updating content, could that be a competing factor for you business.

Is the website easy and fast for users to use?

Have you put yourself in their shoes? By using the website to complete a few common tasks you think a user might do, and can you complete those tasks? Also is the information up to date?

Do you know if your contact form works? (This is such a common problem, you would not believe how many times we hear this, in some cases its not been working for over a year or more!)

Is all text easy to read? With good contrast text even if its over a image?

Are you promoting your website?

Shouting about new or updated content on social media?

Is your website address on receipts, in email and basically everywhere you have customer contact?

Are you making use of the platform that you are paying for?

A few examples:

Your website might have an Content Management System (CMS) that you could use to update the content.

Your hosting might have a feature to update to the current version of PHP. Why would you want to do that? Well it could have a massive effect on the speed of your website plus its good for security not to be using old things.

Your host might offer a Content Delivery Network (CDN) feature that you are not using. Why would I want a CDN? Making your website faster for customers to use means happier and more focused customers.

But what about the...

Now we can hear you saying "But all of these will cost me more money!" and whilst that may be true, we also hope you are asking yourself "But what could be the return?" Now only an idiot would promise a return rate or value without understanding fully your requirements and business goals.

However at the end of the day the website is your only employee that works 24 hours a day every 365 days of the year (The only holiday it gets is when things go wrong). Plus its fully capable of doing several job roles at the same time if you plan that it can.

So what actions should I take?

While we can't write detailed steps to fulfil all the above tasks, as for a start we don't know your business needs, the technologies used to build your website, or the hosting company you are using. We can outline the types of questions, plus give you some ideas to explore with your staff, your website hosting company and your web support company. Or maybe just to explore with a new designer or developer.

The first thing is to get a bench mark for where the website is today. A few simple free steps/tasks can give you this insight and you don't need to be a super technical person to understand them either. So lets explore.

Benchmarking

This is important as it gives us a measurable place to start from covering Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. Sure its an opinionated view but its a repeatable place to work from.

Lets first run Google Lighthouse to obtain a place to start from, we have written about how to do this in Use lighthouse to performance and Accessibility test

Lighthouse will return a report with scores for each of these 4 categories ranging from 0 to 100, if these numbers are greater than 80 in each of the four categories then we can just move on. But these numbers should be close to 100 if you want your website to be in the best place possible, in both mobile and desktop modes.

So lets say you got good numbers in each of these what should we do next?

Explore the website but in the customers shoes

So lets start with your Customer Supports reported common questions and issues, also the questions we highlighted above or try the suggestions laid out in our Use your own website from your customers shoes tip.

So how does the website fair?

Using your website like your one of your users/customers and taking onboard their feedback, you will hopefully highlight key areas for improvement that will encourage new and repeat customers/users.

How you update your website depends a lot on how its built.

A key feature of any business is how quickly can it talk to its customers and react to market changes.

If you have a CMS Content Management System can you and your staff use it?

Maybe some training would help or maybe someone else could take on this role?

But any website even if it does not have a content management system can be updated. Finding a partner that can support you is key.

As an example, any email we receive from our supported customers, results in same or next day updates to their website. Ok this might have a fixed or variable monthly cost but it gives you piece of mind and gets the information in your customers hands or mind.

Its important to be honest with your visitors/customers make sure you promote updates. The simplest way to do this is a date, but this can work against you if you don't keep up with updates. So maybe your wording could make customers think its new, some supermarkets are very good at this, adding new flags or redesigned packaging to make people think its a new product.

Promoting your website

What free ways could you increase where your company's domain can be placed or used and highlighted?

Driving traffic to your website should be a priority over driving traffic to your social media platforms as you have full control of the messaging and availability.

Making full use of the tools you have available

This area is really hard to generally provide guidelines for. But at the end of the day if your website uses PHP or any other programming language making sure you are using an up to date version has major performance gains.

Optimising images you load to your website means users downloads are faster, and having less to wait for means they have less time to get bored and move on elsewhere.

But if you are optimising before upload then how could you make it better for you users? A CDN is a plus and maybe free within your hosting package.

Remember all good hosting companies are happy to answer questions about their platform tools, also all good web development and design companies are happy to answer questions free of charge, or to provide detailed quotes and timelines.

The benchmark steps we got you to carry out earlier highlighted work areas that you could think about working on. But also remember that the law is also moving on and the Accessibility act is not far away, though making sure that everyone can use your website is just good business practice, why limit your offerings.

Content formatting & creation

We have heard a number of times from people struggling to release a new website, due to content creation or the bulk upload of content. This is where technology can play a massive part, plus maybe seeking a little help from the right people.

Say we want to get the specs along with textual descriptions, if you are unlucky and not able to get a data set as a starting point but the supplier has all the details on their own website and are happy for us to use some of the details from there.

This is where scraping comes into play, it will allow us to query the supplier listing and produce a csv file or excel file. (Always ask permission before scraping some one else's data.)

Then we would need to work with the excel sheet to clean, update and dress the data as we need it. Remember if you have an accounts department the chances are you have loads of excel skill in house all you need to do is ask for help to set the sheet up.

If you don't have internal help on Excel then Mynda Treacy has a great channel on YouTube that covers a number of ways of cleaning data in excel in a very clear manor youtube.com/@MyOnlineTrainingHub

I have named excel here but you can use any spreadsheet you are happy to work with, these are a great tools working with large data sets/listings.

So once we have all the data cleaning up we will want to upload it to the shopping or produce database, maybe you are lucky and they offer a bulk up feature. But if not maybe a quick chat with a web developer could easily and quickly get the data uploaded.

The highlighted above workflow should be repeatable for when you want to update product ranges or add a new line of products in the future.

Again maybe you also need the images resizing, optimizing or renaming into the needed standard, this is another area where the computer can take the strain as they are very good at bulk repeatable tasks.

Always try to stay away from planning to retype any data (yes this is still very common) or even copying and pasting, as there is always a faster way.

So the one thing I did not cover above is the new super power that we all have at our fingertips today, for a monthly cost or a one time payment and that is Generative Artificial intelligence (AI), this might be Large Language Model (LLM) or smart agents. These allow us to express in a clear English sentence our wish, it then thinks about it for a whole second or two and starts to output our result of the requested wish.

So this brings new super powers to cleaning up text descriptions, say maybe our wish is to make then all in the same tone/voice, or to be in a set format, then this can be achieved in a few minutes today.

LLM are also great for test/dummy data sets, just define the fields that you require with any constructs needed plus the number of records you need. Wait a few seconds, out comes the required data set with no Data Protection issues going forward. Its never a good plan/idea to test with customers data however careful you are.

Always look across the whole company for a website project skill set, as you will be surprised where you have great resources to solve issues and define repeatable steps. Which is a long time gain for speed and reducing costs of the website.

Two key takeaways for any website is release early and regularly, don't wait for everything to be finished. The web is a great platform allowing you to iterate and keep the project always moving forward with every small release.

You should also keep in mind if you don't measure you won't know which things are working the most for you. Page privacy-friendly website analytics and server logs are a gold mine of important information make sure they are working for you.