These days everyone seems to have a website - from your local cafe’ to your Aunt’s blog. But that doesn’t mean all websites are created equal. To provide an experience to your customers that will create a lasting impression and turn potential leads into actual sales you need to focus on six crucial elements for success:

Re-asses:

Critically examine your unique value propositions to potential customers and evaluate your competition. Re-assess how your website should relate to and support other marketing tactics of your company (like lead generation, for example). What worked in the past might not work well today.

Re-think:

What kind of content would viewers look for on your site? How can we tell your story that goes beyond an online brochure? Would audio podcasts, video or other visual media be more effective? How do we convert web traffic from simple awareness to action? How will results be measured?

Re-purpose:

Let's be smart with your time and money. You may have photos, videos, articles, marketing collateral or industry information that could be effectively re-purposed without reinventing or redoing everything. We also can pull feeds from other news or industry related sites that give your visitors useful content.

Re-design:

An effective design (or redesign) should be consistent with all your marketing collateral and graphic standards. In short, your website design should make you look good. The esthetics are important, as well as a user friendly navigation and it should work across a variety of platforms and devices. The site should provide clear "calls to action". In other words, what do you want your visitors to do?

• You know the web is very likely where people look for you.
• Your website is where they might first meet you.
• You don’t want it to be the last place they see you.

Refine:

Once your site is live, it’s important to monitor website stats and refine your site. This includes improving ranking in search engines, gaining higher lead pull-throughs and offering better visitor experiences once they find you. For example, one website stat that is important is how long they stay. That means improving your site's sticky-ness. Your site should have reasons to go there, reasons to browse & reasons to return.

How? There are many ways, but one approach is informational. Finding information in order to learn is the most common reason that people use the web. Information - useful engaging content, industry updates or share-worthy tips are all part of a good website strategy. By doing these activities, even your social media tactics will have a greater impact. Otherwise you could be wasting your time on Twitter, Facebook and such.

Re-fresh:

When was the last time you updated your current site? Who really controls your company’s website? How long does it take you to get pages updated, and can you change them today — right now if you wanted? You shouldn't have to pay for every change. You should be able to easily embed things like videos, forums or polls in your site. Your want a site that's easy to self manage and offers fresh, updated content. MindActive has solutions for that.

Control Your Content and Stay Relevant

So now you’re a webmaster. You’ve got a brand new site to feature your product to the world but how do you make sure you remain relevant? Who updates your blog? Who refreshes your content? Who is making sure that your website doesn’t fade into obscurity, frozen in time like a relic from another age? You probably don’t employ a fully staffed web development team, but the good news is that with today’s technologies, you don’t have to! Enter the world of CMS (Content Management System).

A CMS is basically software, implemented as a Web application (or website), for creating and managing your site's content. It allows non-technical staff to log in from any computer, any browser and make changes to the website in minutes. In other words, once your CMS website is set up and the framework is in place, it is primarily a website maintenance tool for you or your approved content creators to publish web pages. You could, for example, simply copy and paste content from MS Word™ docs and such. Many of our clients update their sites every day, much like a blog.

Key Benefits of using a CMS System:

• Access Level Controls to content / administration levels
• Secure Member login and restricted content areas
• Web‐based manager to create and update articles pages
• Web‐based manager to update navigation scheme
• Rollback functionality
• Modules such as polling, event management, surveys or photo/video players
• Content generated is SEO‐friendly

Additional Options:

• A Community section (allows for community users to create profiles, share content, posts, photos, articles, internal communications, etc.
• Feeds from / into other media sources
• Newsletter functionality built into site
• eCommerce or secure payment gateway modules

7803 Clayton Rd. Suite A., St. Louis, MO 63117

www.mindactive.com

314.567.1117