If you have discovered the delights of sending out an email newsletter, you may have had the problem of how it relates to your website.
The main purpose of our newsletters is to highlight certain pages on our site, and allow people to easily find the information on there. As we already know which are the popular pages (from our statistics), we can direct more people there.
If it’s too difficult to do, it wont get done.
The key to us actually getting it done is that it’s very easy to do.
We are currently using a fully integrated system that works within our website, rather than as a separate bit of software. It’s not till you use something that is designed to work seamlessly that you realise how much more efficient you can be.
There are plenty of email newsletter providers that do an excellent job (mailchimp.com is a great example), but when you are ’updating’ your website, you want to feel like its all happening in one place.
The added advantage is that you don’t have to be particularly technical to manage these things, allowing our clients a simple way of controlling their online presence.
The Hub
For our clients, we are now taking the approach of looking at their website as one unified place where they can manage the entire online side of their business. We have realised that getting them to shift the focus of operating their business online, completely changes the way they relate to their website.
Before it was important just to have the basic information on there, but as so much of our lives depend on being online, the interaction with websites has changed.
Anything from updates made on your facebook/twitter account, to emails that you send to your customers, should all revolve around the central hub of your site. If for example you are sending visitors off to see your listings on a property portal, the important thing is that they return back to you where they feel more comfortable.
Keeping you website as the central hub has never been so important.
Keeping things working
The other really important thing for us is when it comes to upgrading websites. Software can change very often, as the code is being improved all the time. When it comes to upgrading to the ‘latest’ version it can sometimes disrupt all the delicate design work that was previously done.
This is one of the problems we have experienced with Wordpress (a free blogging/cms system), which is otherwise fantastic! Because a lot of the functionality is provided by many different suppliers, getting everything to work on the latest version can sometimes take up a large amount of programming time. We feel that time could be better spent on the overall design and optimisation.
We are big fans of keeping things simple, and if you can get a lot done with as little resistance as possible, you are onto a winner.
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