Your website - now be honest, is it rubbish?

Your website is not a toy or a novelty. It is a viable aspect of your business. Large plc's use it to reduce customer service calls, rock stars use it to sell gig tickets, and the best retail outlets know that they can shift just as much product, and more variety, to more people through mail order of their online stores.
So if you are in business it is no longer a question of "Shall we build a web site?" or even "When are we getting out web site up?", it is actually:-

"Why isn't my website helping my business?"

Your disorganised intranet will eat up your employees time while they try to look for things, and a disorganised company website will prevent your customers from buying what they want.

But you already know that.

Just how expensive is it?

• Appearing amateurish, so making people not trust you, so they don't spend.
• Annoying customers, when they can't find things, pushing them away to your competitors.
• When potential customers can't find you in the first place.
  

Well designed Information Architecture will improve:-

• Findability - Giving customers easy access to the things they are looking for.
• Usability - Give your customers the easy way to accomplish what they want, whether it be getting your address or buying from you.

And this is all about:-

• Understandability - Good Information Architecture will provide the infrastructure needed to help people turn Information they find into Knowledge.

Unless something is done about it now, the people you want to influence the most will get lost in a sea of information that it getting deeper and wider every day.
Stand out, and make what they want easy to acheive.

Why blogger?

It's easy and it's free!!!

Advantages of using google blogger.

1. Really easy for amatuers to add content. As easy as writing an email.
2. It's a google product, google likes it, makes the main website rank highly in searches
3. Unlimited storage. You add as many pictures, videos, text to the blog as you like and it's free and it will archive it for years to come.
4. You can set different levels of permission so that one person could write, or 5 people or anyone can update the content.

There are other sorts of CMS, content management systems out there and they are fantastic for commercial organisations that can afford a web developers time on the original set up but for low cost you can't beat google's blogger.

Amatuer Clubs Websites

Many amateur share the problem of needing a website that:

· Keep up with what's happening.
· Reports on the latest event, photos, etc
· Telling new members where they are, how much things cost and when events are happening etc.

However, many clubs do not have the money to keep paying a web developer to make the changes.

A solution to this is:
Set up a simple website has:
1. Fixed or permanent information e.g. location, costs, contact info.
2. A blog that can be updated by the club secretary to add information, news and pictures, match results etc..
3. The web developer then builds a "site feed" which drags the information from the blog so it appears, is if by magic on the club's website.

This gives the best of both worlds – a website that is low cost to set up and lets the club regularly update the website without having to pay for a web developer or have training in web programming.

Updating a blog is as easy as writing an email.


To give an idea of cost –
1. You need a “domain name” – this is what you type into the internet to get to your website e.g. “www.my_club.com - costs around £20 per year - depending on if you want a “.com” or a ".co.uk”.
2. Then the website has to sit on a “server” which is connected to the internet
– this is called “hosting”. The cost of hosting a small website approximately £5 per month.
3. Some money for the designing and production of the simple website. 2-3 hours work.

What about twitter?
A twitter feed could also be included on the website, and this is a good idea for short news items like "the game has been cancelled!". This can be updated by phone and followed by members by phone too.