2019 is now in full swing. Most people are back from their January breaks and this means lights, camera, action to kick off the calendar year.

In the spirit of harnessing our beginning-of-the-year enthusiasm for planning and organisation, we recently reviewed our business’ Facebook Page and our personal LinkedIn Profile. We did this to identify any potential updates or refreshments that we may need to make to ensure we start 2019 on the right-marketing-touch-point-foot.

However, we are not going to stop our touch point review there!

Next, we are going to take a long hard look at our business website and check that it is helping your business and not hindering it!

Even if you don’t sell online, the majority of your customers will search for your business on Google before picking up the phone or visiting your business. This first impression of your business will absolutely count!

So to ensure we are impressing our potential customers from the outset, let’s all pledge that in 2019 we will say no to having outdated information, confusing navigation, a lack of call to actions and waaaay too much text on our websites.

Instead, this year we will embrace dynamic imagery and video that inspires your visitor with the story about your brand. We’ll welcome simplicity and easy functional updates that provide your website visitor with a positive experience from the get-go.

We’ll even see if we can achieve some of your more pressing marketing objectives for 2019 (you have written these right?) by adding some additional pop-ups or landing pages.

Firstly, here is my basic, first-review-of-a-website checklist that I will totally (and unashamedly) judge a website by.

Our review is basically broken into three sections; Branding, User Experience (UX) and Utility.

1. Branding (Look and feel)

• Does your website do your businesses brand proud?
• Does it offer simple typography that is easy to read?
• Does it stick to your brands defined colour palette?
• Have you included strong images or videos that showcase your brand, your products and services?
• Is your brand story told in a way that connects with visitors?

2. User Experience (Functionality and usability)

• Does the website have easy to use interface tools and elements that work in intuitive ways?
• Does your website navigation move users effortlessly through the site? I.e. is it obvious what I, the website visitor who doesn’t work at your business, should do next?
• Can I find information easily?
• Can I work out how to contact you easily?
• Can I access information that I might have come looking for easily? Or have you hidden it under headings using industry lingo that only you understand?
• Do you use concise and targeted copy? Or do you waffle on about stuff that you consider to be really important, but we actually don’t know what on earth you are on about?
• Does your website sport modern design techniques and interface? And please tell me it’s mobile responsive!

3. Utility

How hard does your website work for you? Does it simply offer website visitors some information about your business – kinda like an online version of your business’ brochure?

We can do better than that in 2019, for example:

• Your website can encourage email subscriptions (super valuable to any business) with a simple email subscribe call to action or pop-up.
• It can help position you as an expert by featuring you and your teams expert blog articles.
• It can sell products and services online while you are sleeping.
• You can even plug in specific landing pages that provide extra context and sales copy to help convert a website visitor into downloading a guide, subscribing to your email funnel or even better, buying something from you!
• You can link your website to your Facebook Ad account and collect the data about the people visiting your website, so you can advertise to them via Facebook later on.

And all of that is just the beginning!

Your website is a tool that can help you achieve so much in business. Leverage it for all it’s worth by ensuring that it helps to move all of your website visitors (potential customers) closer to a sale.