The Tale Of A Small Business Owners Website Blunder

Things Aren’t Always What They Seam

Recently, I was at a trade show and I was talking to a small business owner about how they currently attract new business. Like many other small businesses, they have a store front in a busy shopping center, and they get a lot of foot traffic. Their particular location is a key to getting new customers, but I was particular interested to learn how they are obtaining and managing leads from their website.

The owner quickly turned on his iPad to bring up his website, which he is very proud of. Just at a glance, I could tell he paid a pretty penny for this website. It was very clean and modern, it didn’t look like something created from a template or in 1980. He started showing me their call-to-actions and contact forms. On the first call-to-action, which offers something for free in a very attractive position on the page, he clicked on it, and it took him to a dead page. My first thought was, “Uh-oh! That’s not good.” To make things even worse, on the home page there was a contact form for visitors to request someone to call them to schedule an appointment. He filled out the form, submitted it, and we waited, and waited, but he never got any notification that someone submitted a form. At this point, the owner was not happy with what was happening on his website that he paid a lot of money to have it custom made.

Mistakes Are Inevitable Without The Right People or Tools

Come to find out, the owner paid someone to create his website a year ago to get him started.  Since then the owner has made changes to the website without testing his work before publishing it. What had happened is the owner deleted a page that he thought wasn’t needed anymore, but didn’t pay attention that the home page was still directed to this other page he deleted.

On the contact form the reason he wasn’t getting emails anymore was because the person that was in charge of getting the contact emails, no longer worked for him and had been gone for 3 months. He never thought to change this or check that employees email box. Sure enough, there were dozens of emails from contact submissions sitting in the inbox, untouched.

While these mistakes happen, they cost this small business owner hundreds of dollars in lost potential customers.

Every Small Business Owners Dilemma

As a small business owner, if you are trying to handle a website yourself, these are mistakes that can be made. Small business owners are caught between trying to work with current customers, finding new customers and managing their business. There are many moving parts to make a successful business run,that is impossible to try to do it alone. You need to find the right people and tools that can help you manage the parts of your business that need attention, but can be offloaded.

Of course, I would recommend to pick one person to dedicate to manage the website, but most small business owners only have a small staff and they aren’t able to manage a website. Besides hiring people, you can always outsource the management to a firm that specializes in website management, but this can be expensive. Another option is to find a tool or tools that provide recommendations or automated reports on your website to find errors. You have to analyze what options are available to you, and what makes the most sense. Learn from this business owner that the mistakes you make, can cost you more then it would to find a solution to the problem.

I hope you found this article interesting and please share it or make a comment below. If you would like to learn more about TruVisibility, and how it can help automate and improve your brand online, visit us at http://www.TruVisibility.com.