2009 is nearly on us so I thought I would give a recommendation to all the companies out there how know that they should be doing something with their website but need a little more encouragement...
The fundamental thing a company MUST do is to make sure that they have good quality web statistics about how there website is performing. It doesn't matter if your site is not performing well - you need evidence! An excellent option for the vast majority companies is to make sure they are using the superb (and free!) Google Analytics web reporting tool.
Introducing Google Analytics
Google Analytics free to use is typically requires only a few hours to get set up and integrated into your website. The great thing is that once it set up you don't have to do anything - ok it would be great if you sweated over the data straight away but, seeing as it'll take a while for a meaningful volume of data to come through, you can just site back and like the black box flight recorder on your website do its stuff.
As I say, it doesn't matter even if you're fairly sure that your current does isn't working (and we'll worry about what working means for another discussion) - the point is the Google Analytics will give you data as to why it is not working AND you'll have a baseline set of data to compare to when (and I'm saying WHEN here!) you redesign your website (e.g. "this data is before the relaunch and this is after").
Get the measuring habit...
You need to get into the habit of measuring your website and your online activities because it IS measurable. And what is measurable can be accountanble and can be considered in terms of return-on-investment...but underpinning this is access to meaningful data.
A great new years resoution for your business is to get Google Analytics installted on your site and get someone in your business used to reading the plain English reports. It's an essential first step to getting the Internet working for your business.
Example of Google Analytics dashboard below. See the simple graphs etc? It's not scary!
I agree with this post the great thing is that once it set up you don't have to do anything - ok it would be great if you sweated over the data straight away but, seeing as it'll take a while for a meaningful volume of data to come through, you can just site back and like the black box flight recorder on your website do its stuff. thanks for the post.
-faith-
Posted by: San Francisco web design | 02 April 2009 at 07:57 AM