Website Design and Marketing True Value
Does this week’s railing against the free web by Prince, quickly following on the heels of the paywall now firmly in place around the Times and Sunday Times, seem to be heralding a new era of two-tier online engagement between paying for original quality content/news and free access to all other common sources?
It’s possible that the assumptions of whole generations of users who have grown up to believe that the essential web, websites and content is grown, run and consumed in a so-called ‘no overheads’ Garden of Eden, are about to be challenged.
A common myth seems now to be woven into the general understanding of online as automatically being cheaper than offline. This may have been briefly thought to be the case in the early days of the web but the business of creating today’s web design and online marketing for operating a visible, successful eCommerce presence is a grown up sophisticated operation indeed.
It simply isn’t the case, as some business owners tend to assume, that because there appears to be less material costs involved in constructing a purposeful website, developing its functionality, creating powerful content and going ‘live’ than opening a high street or retail park outlet, that it follows that there is a corresponding downsizing of cost ratio to value.
To simply exist and attempt to function in today’s complex multi platform, cross channel consumer environment with constant attention to physical as well as virtual networks, means continual in depth technical support, experience and advice. In other words, a continuous evolving infrastructure that both supports and is responsible for driving the business forward, without which, the business will fail online.
A quick check list shows this very readily, e.g. connectivity, servers, bandwidth, multi-communication functionality, not to mention daily, full time attention to site analytics and devising current marketing strategies …
This all takes time, expertise , experience and knowledge. There is today’s important areas of social media and essential link building to correctly manage and operate if a website is to have any chance of driving meaningful targeted traffic to the desired customer conversion process.
In short, websites cost money to build, run and grow, and this means proper investment. SEO site optimisation needs to be updated to reflect changing consumer needs and behaviour. Running PPC ads on high cost, generic keywords once a month may no longer be just one of the few invoices business owners should expect to be a regular outgoing.
Google algorithms are no longer simple worker spiders but search executives headhunting for genuine quality content to ‘vote’ up your site ranking!