How do you know what your website needs?

When was the last time you looked through your organisation’s website?  Do you know if it’s up to date? Is it delivering to its full potential?  Do you know what it is supposed to be delivering? We see time and again websites launch and then just exist, so we wanted to give you 4 simple tasks that you can build into your regular processes to ensure that you are giving your website what it needs for it to then deliver back to you.

This may seem like a strange question, but can you think back to why you got your website built in the first place? Was it simply to provide an online presence for your business or organisation, or was there something specific that you wanted it to do? Perhaps enable bookings to a service that you offer? Sign up to a newsletter that you produce? Or to allow you to share information with customers? If you have a specific requirement from your website, do you measure the performance?  Is it delivering as you expected it to – or even over delivering? Do you have metrics in place to tell you what’s going on? It’s important to look through your site regularly and ensure that it is in fact doing what you set out for it to do. So, the first action is:

• Ensure that you and indeed the organisation are clear on the main purpose of your website and if you haven’t done so already, set some KPI’s to regularly measure whether it is performing against this purpose.

If you’ve had your organisation’s website live for a few years, you could find that the business has moved on, changed focus and your website is actually lagging behind. It could be the case that the functionality isn’t matching up to help deliver your organisational objectives, and/or the messaging throughout the site isn’t in line with other communication channels? If this is the case, it’s a wasted opportunity to not build the digital presence of your business, so our second action is to:

• Schedule a time to thoroughly audit your website. Check that the content, design and imagery are in harmony with what you are communicating offline. Equally, think through what you want to enable customers or potential customers to do on your site. Is it useful? Is it enough? Do they need to be able to action or access other things? Is the customer journey through the site in line with offline customer experiences?

How many people visit your website each month? Which pages are they visiting the most? At what point do they enter and exit the site? Are there any patterns? What can you learn from the pages of the site your users are accessing the most? Is there a reason they are using these pages the most?  How can this inform other parts of your organisation? Your third action is to:

• Get clued up on the traffic and usage stats for your website. You can do this via analytical tools such as Google and it will help you to understand the story of your digital world each month. It’s important not to underestimate the insights you can gain through measuring the activity on your website.

How do users arrive at your website? It’s not enough to passively plant your web address on your printed communication and hope that people will remember to visit.  In order to encourage people to visit your website, you need to be active in giving them a reason to visit. Regular social media posts, articles and blogs through industry communication channels, a robust SEO strategy using a combination of regular updates to web content, sponsored social activity, Google AdWords and other offline channels. Your final action is to:

• Develop a monthly plan of activity to drive users to your website and of course, follow the action in point 3 to measure the traffic and pattern of navigation through your site.

We hope our 4-point plan helps to get you on the road of ensuring that you make the most of your website.  Having a site is a really important part of the marketing and reputation of your organisation and with continual focus it can help to revolutionise how you operate.

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 tailor-made tech solutions 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.