Survival Guide — Entrepreneurship: Profitable Website Managment; Updating Your Website

If you have spent any time in corporate America, you are more than familiar with the ritual of the annual performance review. It’s usually a dreaded time by both employees and management alike, but it’s the one chance organizations get to take inventory of staff achievements and to manage future progress through setting goals and objectives. Sure there is often a lot of fluff and not much substance to these formal reviews—but on a personal level it can be an important time to sharpen your focus and, for deserving employees, to ask for a raise or promotion.

While, for the self-employed small businesses owner, there’s beauty in no longer wasting time on busy work, filling out forms and attending stuffy, uncomfortable meetings with the boss, reviews are still necessary. Whether you find a formalized planning system or notes scribbled on napkins more your style, you need to keep your “resume” of skills and capabilities up to date. In website management terms, this means updating your website frequently to reflect the things you care about and do extremely well to create value for your clients.

If you are wondering how often your website should be updated, I wish I could give you a straight answer. In reality, it depends on several factors. How strong is your current design? How much has your position changed in your market? How compelling are the updates your customers get through other channels, such as your blog or newsletter? Is your website your most profitable asset? There’s no better place to begin answering these questions then by asking what your existing clients think.
As you think about how to up your website performance a notch or two, and perhaps bump elbows with colleagues and industry gurus at WPPI this year, consider my top three website management challenges for 2009. I think they will surely fill more than a few hallway conversations, if not help you better focus on critical aspects of your Web marketing strategy.
Original Designs Rule!

To be clear, your website doesn’t have to win any “Best Of” awards to be effective at paying the bills and winning new clients. However, it should rank high on originality and usability scales. Without originality baked into the organization and aesthetic of your website, your branding efforts will drown in a world of derivative, cookie-cutter styles that your prospective clients have seen before. Nothing can replace, nor capture the eye and excite prospective clients like a clean, fresh and original design. If you take pride in the craftsmanship of your photographic works, why would you consider allowing anything less than a professionally designed website to showcase your work?

Another obstacle that must be removed is the perception that you have invested little or no time building a unique design to showcase your work. How can you expect a client to spend thousands of dollars for your photography-related products and services when you haven’t invested the same effort demonstrating your creative sensibilities?

To make the formula simple, why not invest as much in a custom design for your website as the highest priced product or service you currently offer? Is your most popular portrait package going for $800? Is your destination wedding package going for $2500? The higher your prices go, the more challenging they are to sell. Building a unique brand online and organizing your website’s content so that selling is a “down-hill” proposition will make it a lot easier to achieve profitable results in the long run.

As much as we wish to convince ourselves otherwise—status symbols, designer brand names and custom designs all conspire to help consumers decide where to spend their money. If you consider your target customer to be Nordstrom-shopping, luxury-car driving, high-income earners that our economy produces, then by all means, avoid building your brand with a bargain bin mindset.

Make Your Site Accessible
Next generation website management tools have promised various one-click, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG features to build and maintain a professional website. Even the most popular tools on the market may be great at managing galleries, but fall horribly short in creating dynamic navigation components that won’t break. Others may be great at making Flash presentations as easy and snappy as the best custom sites out there.

However, much deeper problems can manifest themselves when using the latest website building tools without a healthy dose of discrimination as to what works and what doesn’t. From fixed font sizes to poor table edge and text/background color contrast, to missing (or bad) page titles, buggy JavaScript, slow loading pages or browser compatibility issues (the list goes on), making a site user friendly and accessible is too often an afterthought in a website development project. Some of these issues are caused by poor design choices, lazy coding habits or corrections made impossible with the tool of choice.

Knowing who is using your website and how it is being used can make a huge difference when addressing accessibility issues. With laptops, iPhones and other mobile devices now dominating the way we use the Web, it is increasingly important to play a good offense. Make no accident by reaching out to these channels with a compact, targeted version of your website that will provide perfectly formatted contact at the right time.

A lot of the WYSIWYG tools that I have seen over-promise and under-deliver. Make usability and accessibility top priorities this year. Every JavaScript module, Flash presentation and widget you add to your website also adds to the burden (and duty) of managing usability and shaping a positive user experience for your customers. If you plan your website design around making the selling experience as streamlined and efficient as possible, the choice about which tools and features to use will practically be a no-brainer.

Invest In Blogging
Blogging may be all but dead, with more and more people using social Web technologies like Twitter and Facebook for personalizing marketing communications. The link between short frequent posts (Twitter) and Facebook works well for established customers and those who consider you their friend. Some of you may have questioned whether blogging is still of any value, especially when considering the odds that your next customer will come from a friend of a friend on a social network who saw their friend’s pictures and contacted you through an introduction.

So for those who have important information to share, such as images from recent shoots (as all photographers should have) the blog still trumps social marketing where first-time customers are concerned. While your blogging frequency may be less than it was just a year ago, the role is still significant because site membership requirements will no doubt be a barrier for some prospective clients. The blogging format is also great because it doesn’t have third party advertisements ad nauseum or unnecessary chatter coming from “friends” on your social network. That makes the professionally groomed blog a nearly perfect environment for fostering new relationships with clients without worrying about whether you have revealed too much personal information.

One case in point is Marcus Bell’s new blog (https://snipurl.com/98wbm), which acts as a 24/7 extension of his studio. In spite of having a beautiful studio that gets refitted every 18–24 months, it’s only part of his customer-acquisition strategy. Recently I chatted with Marcus over email and asked him to share with the readers of my column his rationale for investing in blogging and custom design. “We receive only a handful of walk-ins each month, but we will have a thousand visits to our site each week, sometimes even in one day. But the Web (and my blog) is 24/7 and can be the most important front window of the business. It is worth investing big dollars in. Once you’re past the startup phase, I believe getting a custom site is the only way to stand out above the crowd.”

So before kissing the annual performance-review process goodbye forever, learn from it what you will. Take that with the conviction that Socrates held, that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Through personal reflection, assessing what works and what doesn’t with regard to your Web presence, and by marking goals and objectives for 2009 you can home in and leverage the expertise you have that will help your business stay afloat in these tough economic times.

Steve Tout is the owner and principal photographer of Coffeehouse Photography, a boutique wedding photography shop in the Pacific Northwest. He has worked in sales, consulting, Web development and information security for 10 years with recent positions at Oracle Corporation and US Bank. Readers can contact him directly by email at [email protected].