10 Questions to ask about your website.

As a business owner, you do not simply tape a flyer to a lamp post and expect the world to beat a path to your door. We live in the era of “content marketing” which demands more than ever from you to establish and expand a credible presence. That almost always requires having a modern online identity.

So much goes into creating a feature-packed website that says you’re open for business and legimatately up-to-date. Yet when you hit the launch button, what happens next is very much up to you. That’s why website owners need proactive, effective website management. Every thing from marketing to admin and tech, with an entire gamut of goodies in between. No magiccal elves spend their nights widde awake waving website wands for you, unless you’ve hired someone on the other side of the international dateline.

Audiences these days see and use many highly sophisticated websites. The bar is high, and they have little patience for difficult or glitch-laden sites. You are required to keep current; educating yourself, your staff, or outside service vendors and being in good communication all along the way. Visitors want relevant, easy-to-access expertise. Your audience has more choices than ever, and they judge sites in milliseconds, unfair as that is.

These are the 10 questions that require thoughtful consideration, long before you go live, whether you update an exisiting site, build a new custom site, or buy an all-in-one service.

1. Who will be responsible in your organization for website management?

2. What security procedures will you actively maintain to protect your website as an asset?

3. How many hours will those responsible allocate weekly to website management?

4. What technical knowledge about site management do those responsible have?

5. What marketing knowledge about site management do those responsible have?

6. How frequently will posting and content refreshing be done on the website and who will do it?

7. What is the commitment of (a) time and (b) budget to promoting the website?

8. What social media will be used to proactively support the website?

9. What criteria will be used to measure and evaluate the website’s effectiveness?

10. What proactive marketing plans are in place to help grow the business as a whole?

Websites are about as optional as having a business email or phone number is these days. Without one, you aren’t considered to be in business, even if you don’t do e-commerce. Many say “If you’re not online, you’re not in business".” Social Media is a tempting substitute, and a handful of “Influencers” make that look decetively easy. But when hackers hijack, or a platform’s secutiry bots eject you unfairly, your business can crash, too. Services and resources to create stable websites have dramatically increased in number, but not all are created equal and none are rally set-it-and-forget-it.

Spending some quality time thinking through these 10 Questions will enable you to choose wisely, whether you are updating an existing site, or building your first. Focus well beyond the development and launch stages to what your ongoing online and bsuiness growth needs will require.

— Diane A. Curran

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P.S. Diane launched many websites for small business owners during the past 20+ years, extending from earlier in-depth experience and with the original “database” world invented decades earlier along with the revolutionary “desktop workstations.” These two fundamental concepts transformed business and life itself. She consults for small business owners and solopreneurs facing the daunting task of selecting scalable resources that suit their development needs and goals. Questions invited here.