best practices
Getting Started: The Site Audit
These days getting started on creating a new and improved website really begins by taking stock of where you’re at today – what we call a site audit.
The first thing we like to do is listen. We want to know what is working well for you right now and where you feel you’re missing the mark. What are you doing in other areas of your marketing efforts? How well does your current website reflect your product line, specs and the overall branding of your organization?
We’ll take a look at your site and measure it against some objective criteria as well as a couple subjective ones and give you our honest evaluation – the good, the bad and the ugly!
We’re looking for some really critical foundation level things to begin with like the navigation and how well your content is organized (can you get from one page to another in 1 or 2 clicks?) and how search engine friendly is your content?
They’re both mission critical. In fact, it doesn’t matter how attractive your site is, if you miss the boat on these, well, then your ship has sailed, to continue the metaphor.
And while beauty is in the eye of the beholder we’ll look at the design to see if it helps visitors understand the primary communication versus secondary.
All of this assessment and input dovetails with the planning process and helps generate fresh ideas to help ramp up your new website so that it drives new business.
