It’s 2024! Happy New Year! The start of the new year is always a good time to get good intentions and positive action in place in our personal lives but also at work.
Welcome to a new year! The pandemic is largely behind us, but we start this year in a difficult place economically. Households and businesses alike are struggling with increasing running costs and making the most of what you already have is a key thought for this year and the focus of our very first blog article for 2023.
Your website is one of the most important tools in your organisation. A window into the product or services you offer, an internal and external communication channel and a way of bringing to life your brand. Utilising your website to its fullest can be a cost-effective way of making a really positive impact on your business so we’ve pulled together five key areas for you to consider:
1. Keep it fresh
We’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but it cannot be said enough! Schedule in time to regularly review the content on your website. As a minimum, ensure that your messaging and imagery is up to date but to utilise your site more fully, consider the strategic role your website plays in your business. If you are in a sector which has specific cycles or seasons, how can you bring this to life on your website and drive more appeal and relevance to potential customers through regularly changing content? How can you use messaging and design to ensure that users are enjoying the best experience navigationally through your website? Would your website benefit from the use of film? Can you link other content sources to your website? This is just a starting place, for a more in-depth guide to keeping content fresh, read our previous blog article dedicated to this subject:
https://www.olamalu.com/blog-page/planning-success-how-keep-your-website-content-fresh
2. Access free stuff
If you’d like to update the imagery on your website but don’t have the budget for new photography, then you may want to consider royalty free stock shots instead. There are a number of very good online catalogues including Getty, Shutterstock and Pexels which hold a large number of images for use either as royalty free or at a small licence fee. Alternatively, you could get in touch with a local photography group or a student at a local college. For a small fee, you will have an image or set of images which are unique to your organisation as well as help an amateur photographer to gain more experience.
3. Give users a reason to visit your website
Just having a website isn’t enough. You need to actively drive traffic to it by giving existing and potential customers a reason to visit.
Pushing out news is a good way to drive new visits to your website. Are you running special offers or discounts? Perhaps you have a new product or service? Is there something different happening in your industry sector this year that would be beneficial for your customers to know about? There are many different areas that are useful, interesting or exciting to existing and potential customers and ensuring such messages are present on your website and then using other communication channels such as social media, newsletters and even conversations to drive traffic there is important. If you’d like to explore this area further, read the article below:
https://www.olamalu.com/blog-page/how-can-you-drive-traffic-your-website
4. Show off your skills
We are all so busy doing our jobs that it’s often hard to find the time to write about projects we’ve worked on. However, writing up a case study is a really effective habit to get established in your organisation for many different reasons. It can help with future pitches for new work, help to bring to life what you can do if you want to cross sell different parts of your business with existing clients, it can be a useful part of on-boarding new starters and of course, it’s a great way to showcase your skill sets on your website whilst helping to keep content fresh and relevant.
Don’t be put off. Case studies don’t have to be long or complicated, they just need to have a logical and consistent approach which clearly describes the objective of the project, what you did and what the outcome was. Take a look at ours for inspiration:
5. It’s a team effort
Whether yours is a large organisation or a small business, ownership of content is important. Websites can often have layers and layers of deep content that is sometimes left untouched for years. Assigning specific areas of content to different teams will ensure everything is kept up to date, opportunities are maximised and with one overall owner, the site looks and feels coherent.
Can we help?
We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down to earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been developing websites and designing tailormade tech solutions including apps for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years.
We work with many of our clients as an ongoing technical partner, but we also offer a consultancy service to solve a specific strategic challenge.
January 2023