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A Case for Traditional Websites

Guest post by: Faith Seekings

Article Overview: Getting involved in social media is a great marketing tactic to add to the overall strategy, plus engage with clients and your community. However, it's not a good idea to completely replace a traditional website with all social media, all the time. One, your public still needs a place to easily find basic information about your company and products or services. Think of your site as home base and integrate social media with it. Two, this approach is confusing to the visitor and defies all the basics of usability and conversion.

A Case for Traditional Websites

Over coffee with a colleague recently he told me how although he had been skeptical about blog ROI, once he started one the traffic to his company website went from a few a week to hundreds a day. A great result! Then he said ‘we don’t need a real website anymore and took it down.’ This was my introduction to this new phenomena: completely replacing all forms of traditional marketing tools with social media. I think it’s a risky move.

Major Brand 'Skittles' Went Gung-ho For Social Media

With their main navigation linking away but keeping the navigation present, Skittles is one big social media smorgasbord – kind of cool. ‘Products’ links to wikipedia, ‘Chatter’ to Twitter, ‘Friends’ to Facebook, Media to Flickr and YouTube. All corporate/product information has vanished. It was a bold move and is being discussed.

In this instance, they took a product that most of us know. B2B companies are in a much different boat than popular candy.

Is All Social Media, All the Time Risky?

After encountering several websites that are essentially big blogs or portals to social media sites, I came away confused. One person was promoting himself as one thing but when I checked out his website I had no idea what he actually did. It was disorienting. All I found was reams of random information, no ’services’ or description of what he did. I eventually found his tagline which clued me in to what he did, but was different from what he promoted himself as. Other sites have had regular navigation, but the home page content was still very confusing because it was all blog posts – it’s like joining in a conversation halfway through.

One I looked at was so blog-like and grass roots in design that I thought it was broken and I was looking at the default site chart. It was the navigation and I had to scroll past a lot of text to find any navigation.

As valuable assets to marketing toolkits, blogs and other social media vehicles are wonderful in building content, community, Google ranking and demonstrate your genius by providing useful information. However, I don’t think the above is a good approach for two main reasons. One, I believe all companies still need basic traditional marketing tools like websites and business cards to look legitimate. Two, this approach defies all the basics of usability and conversion.

First Impressions – Looking Legit

Some clients have asked ‘do I really need an address on my business card?’ I tell them yes - otherwise it invokes the idea that you’re a fly-by-night or working out of your mom’s basement. There’s something suspicious about companies that don’t have one. You may be wonderfully successful, however, when wooing new clients, especially any larger than you, an address implies a sense of brick and mortar, of longevity, professionalism, dependability. I feel the same about websites. They need to include basic information about your company, along with your brilliant insights and generous information sharing.

The Need for Professionalism

A blog is amateurish in presentation, as it should be. Taking into consideration content is king, websites still need to be ‘designed’ to look professional and consistent with the rest of your branding. Benefits of professional design -- if it’s easy/attractive to look at, engaging, if visitors identify with the images, the user experience is much more pleasant and they’ll probably stay longer. A professional look with organized type, images and colour versus a wall of black text. Hmmm.

Remember the Basics of Usability

People have no patience anymore. To let visitors know they are in the right place and entice them to keep clicking, they need to see something engaging and a short blurb with the basics of what you do. Traffic analysis repeatedly shows that when visitors arrive at a site with a lot of text and too many navigation links, they are overwhelmed and leave. This is how I feel when I arrive at the type of sites I mentioned above totally confused when I just wanted to find basic information.

Basics rules still apply:

• 5–9 main navigation items with short
• Make information really easy to find and fast to get to.
• Sweet and concise copy, especially on the home page
• People like threes so create three special links directly to the top things visitors are likely to be looking for

Think of your home page like a first date: don’t give too much information or ask for too much commitment up front. Let them get to know you a little first. But, do make it easy to get to that fabulous content.

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Article Tags: marketing strategy, Rapport, social media, traditional websites, website design



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