Meet Sally.  She is your new staff member.  Her principle role is to be in charge of sales and customer care.  As such she will be one of the primary faces of your business to the world.

Let’s see how Sally is doing on her first day.
You observe her unseen from the back of the shop.
Her blonde hair hangs messy around her shoulders.  Her shirt is untucked at the back and her stockings have a ladder in them.  You are about to walk forward and talk to her about these things, when a customer enters the shop and walks towards Sally.  You decide to stand back and see what she does.

She smiles at the customer and waits patiently behind her counter.  They ask her where the new maps are.

Instead of showing them, she picks up a pink fluffy bunny off the counter top, and makes it do a little dance.  She sings in a goofy voice a ditty about how your store is their favourite newsagency.  You recognise it as your radio advertising ditty, and now you can say that you know what it sounds like when sung by someone totally tone deaf.

Sally then smiles at the bemused customer and points to a shelf.
‘The maps are over there’
The customer heads off in the direction indicated.
After a minute or so Sally calls out,
‘Sorry, actually they’ve been moved to aisle three’.

She then proceeds to pull out a nail file and do her nails, not noticing when the customer sneaks out the door, without having purchased the item that they were very keen to buy.

So, what’s the moral of the story, go online so that you don’t have to hire any more staff?  Not exactly.

I want you to ask yourself, how many of you are running websites that are Sallys?

Does your website have messy hair and a ladder in its stocking?  Not all sites have to have a corporate wow effect, but they should consistently promote your brand.  Many websites are wearing the equivalent of five year old worn out clothes – they have not been updated or revamped in ages.

But beyond Sally’s poor appearance, her biggest failing was her poor customer appearance.  We can put up with sites that aren’t  the best looking if they help us find what we want easily.  Is the first aim of your site to address the primary need of your most important customers?  All sites should be able to identify an ideal target audience.  The ones that you really want to persuade.  And you should have primary goals identified for that audience – whether it is to purchase your premium product or to contact you etc.
Most sites will also have secondary goals eg, to sign people up to the newsletter.

So is your site solving your customer’s problems?  Or are you full of distractions, like Sally’s singing bunny routine.  Think I am being over the top?  How many sites used to use little animated .gif images, or played a tune?  How many sites still have a flash ‘Welcome’ page?  Do you think these businesses really want to convey the message that the primary goal of their website is to say ‘Welcome’ to people?  Your website should funnel your customer to what you and they both want.

Is your website a Sally in that it gives poor directions?  How is your information, your navigation?  Can people easily get around the site and find the things that you offer?  Ask someone who does not know your site at all to perform a task on your site.  Watch them.  How easy do they find it? If people can’t easily find it, they won’t easily buy it, or be converted by it.  Is your site sticky, helpful, informative, or does it just file its nails while customers trickle out again?

At the end of the day, there are a lot of websites that need a revamp if they are to achieve what they should, and that is to help you make money.