Brainstorm Design Blog

When you launch your new website, have you ever thought about its purpose? What do you want to get out of it? What do you want visitors to do? I often get clients telling me: “We don’t use our website for getting business, it’s just an online brochure”. But it doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t rely on your website for new business. It’s still a vital tool for engaging with your customers. Your website should always have a call to action. 

When you’re having your website designed, have you ever asked yourself the following questions:

1. What do I want to achieve from my website? Do I want more subscribers? More sales? More enquiries?
2. Have I set any targets for achieving these goals? E.g. 25% of new business enquiries should come from my website.
3. How will I measure my goals?

A website is more than just an online brochure, it’s a vital sales tool that works around the clock, advertising your business. If you do the following preparatory work before your website is designed, it will go a long way towards ensuring a successful outcome.  

Facebook have just announced they are going to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6. What about you? Do you intend to continue supporting it?

IE6 may only have 5% of the market, but a lot of those users are concentrated in the business sector where many corporate IT departments will only support IE6. (the same applies for UK Government departments).

And therein lies a dilemma. Stop supporting IE6 and you lose out on potential business customers. Continue to support IE6 and you may be incurring significant web development costs just to make your website accessible to a small percentage of your users. 

 Website designers seem to be two a penny these days. Whenever I go to networking meetings of any description, there are a few financial advisers, a few accountants and just about everyone else seems to be a website designer.  If you are considering a career in website design, be aware, the jobs market is saturated with them.