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At Netflare we spend our working lives helping businesses to develop really hard working websites.
Websites that deliver real benefits and repay the investment many times over by drawing in business and persuading prospects to become committed customers.
Many of the business owners we work with are highly motivated, ambitious individuals who, when they see how much more their websites could achieve, become very involved and proactive.
However, we have had a suspicion that there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of business websites that are just languishing in cyberspace, forlorn and unloved by their owners and ignored by potential customers.
So we set out to test our suspicions and we were taken aback at the sheer scale of website neglect we uncovered (the research was undertaken by an independent market research company.)
The research was conducted across a spread of small businesses spanning nineteen business sectors concerned in the main with business to consumer activities.
Here are some of the main findings:
- 23% of sites of small B2C companies have never been updated since their launch.
- If the site has been updated, the average time between revisions is ten months.
- The content of many sites is inaccurate - if not obsolete.
- Websites were originally designed four years ago (on average) for the 19 sectors in this survey.
- Interestingly, 25% of small B2C companies have no idea what sales are generated through people visiting their website.
- The average spend is £250 per year, excluding start up costs.
We feel there are four main, overarching conclusions to be drawn from the research, and to help business owners, we have created brief pdfs which you can download here.
The four main conclusions are
Business owners need to have the confidence that they can, quite simply and with the right content management system, keep their websites delivering optimum performance themselves.
If business owners don’t grasp the basic concepts of website marketing, then they run the very real risk of the website failing.
It is entirely possible to take full responsibility for your own website in its entirety. There is nothing difficult or scary about creating effective content and managing the technical aspects of a website.
Many business owners feel they need support in the above areas and are reticent about calling in individual experts. However, with the right support you will be able to control and manage all the risks associated with taking complete ownership and the pdfs will tell you how to do this.
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