Why you need a fresh spin on your website Revamping your company's website can have significant benefits to the growth of your business, but many company directors still think that it is not necessarily the right thing for them. Channel firms have, generally been slow to revamp their websites. James Palmer, managing director at Nine Telecom, comments: Most businesses, and we are equally to blame, get a website and leave it. If you're an offline company with a web presence, most people think just having anything online will do. They don't maximise the opportunity. Your site is the first thing most customers, potential dealers and partners go and look at. If it looks stuffy or two or three years out of date, that's the kind of company they'll think you are. Your website is a worldwide advertising hording and that's how you need to think of it. If someone looks at it and it's a mess, that's how you're going to be viewed.Nine Telecom rebranded its website 18 months ago as it changed its name from Gold UK. Since then, it has added small amounts to the site. Now, Palmer intends to gut and revamp the site. I want to freshen it up a bit and keep us up to date with the latest trends. In Spring we will probably do a complete redesign. Web design has moved on over the last 18 months, with online direct debit mandates, online order sign up and online customer service functionality. I want to make it much more of a customer interface, rather than just information; I want people to interact with it more, and I hope some of the new functionality will attract customers to use it more than they do right now.Ocean Telecom has recently revamped its website. Steve Bradford, managing director at Ocean Telecom, explains why the first site was unsatisfactory: We knew we needed a web presence, but we weren't sure about content. We also had a cost issue, so really we just threw something up on the Internet. I wanted us have something that would allow customers to find us through search engines, which would show them pretty much everything we do and offer as a company. I don't want someone going to our website and going away thinking they should use someone else. The website is an additional assurance to the customer that your company can do what it says you can. We've got a significant number of leads since we've been doing it property.G3 revamped its website last summer. Tony Parish, managing director at G3, explains why: Two years ago I thought the website looked fine. It was just good enough at the time for us to go live with and not be embarrassed by, even though we did it on a shoestring. Last year, I decided it didn't look quite corporate enough. It got to the stage where I was embarrassed to tell people to go and took at our website. I wanted it to look clean and simple. You want new prospects to go to your website and think, They look professional, and here's all the information I need on what they are and do'. It's like a brochure. It has to look the part, providing a view of the quality of your company which will give your target market comfort, and get you on the next rung of the sale.Xpert Communications rebranded in September and launched a new website to go along with its fresh image. The objective of its website is to give the company an online presence to promote the business to prospective customers and provide information to its existing customer base. The most important aspect of the revamped Website design for Nikki Ratcliffe, group marketing manager at Xpert Group, was the home page. That's your shop window,she says. It's the first thing people see and it encourages them to come back. We show customers solution areas and market sectors, for horizontal and vertical cuts according to what the customer is looking for.Xpert's website also contains a good statistics tool, which enables the company to see where visitors are choosing to go, and where they click through to. Ratcliffe comments: A stats package enables you to monitor which bits of the site work and which don't. If you do that cleverly, you can tie the information back into your marketing activity, such as if a number of visitors to a certain section of your site click on security next, you can focus your marketing on that particular area to that segment.Tony Raynor, managing director at Abbey Telecom, runs two companies, each with a website for promotion and sales purposes. One is for Abbey Telecom and the other is for Phones4Less. While the Abbey Telecom website is small and aimed at promoting Abbey Telecom's image, Phones4Less' Website is another matter, Raynor says. This site is focused on sales and contains around 300 pages. Raynor explains; Abbey Telecom's site is all about letti'ig customers and potential business know what we're about. In 2000 we decided we needed to be fully eCommerce enabled, so customers could click and buy. We launched Phones4Less as an eCommerce business, so there's no sales effort. The beauty of it is I go to bed then wake up in the morning and I've made more money. I can't tell you how good that feels.The investment is worth it, Ratcliffe says, who comments that dealers who fail to utilise the Internet property are missing a trick: They can obtain return on investment from their website. There are simple tricks through search engine optimisation and marketing that can drive shed loads of business through the site.Resellers should not fail to run a great website, Bradford agrees. We're in a world where everybody starts their searches for information on the web. Very few people trawl through the Yellow Pages any more. Unless you've got a presence on the web, you're missing out.• Top tips Don't make the entry to the site too complicated with graphics that cannot be skipped. Don't make the load time o each page too slow. .-^ Keep the Interface to the site vanilla flavour, for intuitive navigation. Spend time learning how to get to the top of the search engine heap. Promote your website to drive traffic through your site. SOLUTIONS For Call and Contact Centres - Callview : Sophisticated yet simple to use - Cost effective but profitable to sell T : 0870-6005001 I F : 0870-6005002 I E : sales@callview.com I W: callview.com

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