Stop Sacrificing Resources: Turn Your Website From a Liability to An Asset.

Why I wrote a guide about leveraging your website:

• Most businesses find themselves burdened with the task of making additional edits to their website because they fear breaking it.
• Most businesses want to build landing pages for their marketing campaigns, but can’t without the need of a developer. 
• Numerous internal teams want to move away from WordPress or are dissatisfied with their current WordPress-based website. Working with the website has become frustrating, and devoid of any joy.
• Most businesses recognize that they have outgrown their website and require a refresh, yet the idea of completely redoing a website is exceptionally intimidating.
• Many businesses allocate excessive resources to maintenance, even when it's unnecessary and avoidable.

What you’ll learn in this guide:

• You’ll learn the approach you need to take to enable yourself or your internal team to make personalized adjustments and create new pages, all without relying on a boring generic template or a coder.
• Next, I will provide guidance on the elements you have to look at when choosing the best website platform for your business.
• We'll then dive into how to bypass the hassles of website maintenance.
• You'll also gain insights into setting up your website for future growth, ensuring a stress-free journey without encountering obstacles related to changing website platforms that lead to pulling your hair out.
• And finally, you'll learn how to leverage your branding for maximum impact, ensuring that you remain memorable in the eyes of your users.

Step 1: Choose a website platform that fits your actual business needs.

Selecting the correct website platform for your business can have a profound impact on your digital presence. It can either make or break your website.

You can't simply choose the most popular website platform and expect everything to turn out well. I've witnessed this approach fail countless times, leading to horrible outcomes.

It should function as a trusted ally rather than a persistent issue. Despite the abundance of information on the internet, many businesses still make poor platform choices due to personal biases and inadequate research.

Investing in the right platform is a critical strategic decision for your business.

The negative impacts of using an inappropriate platform are: 

• Loss of resources
• High maintenance costs
• Expensive expansions and updates
• Wasting time on insignificant problems
• Employee frustration 
• Inaction on critical matters
• Unexpected crashes
• Slow website performance
• Inefficient workflow
• Limited customization options
• Lack of accessibility
• Feared to deal with

All of these factors can directly impact your business's bottom line and its ability to operate efficiently and profitably. In fact, it becomes harder to deal with your website over time. In other words, your website can turn into a liability.

That's why I will break down the variables we are examining to determine which website platform best suits our client’s needs. Consider the following variables as a checklist for selecting the right website platform for your business.

Scalability:

Your chosen platform should grow with your business. As your operations expand, your website should seamlessly accommodate increased traffic and content without becoming overly burdensome.

You need to future-proof your website because a website launch is just the beginning.

Working with a strategic roadmap and consistently evaluating your website's relevance to your end users is only half of the journey to success. 

The work on your website is continuous. Just as you wouldn't buy a new car and neglect regular maintenance checks, your website also requires ongoing attention.

By adopting an iterative approach and implementing mechanisms for continuous user feedback, you not only maximize your investment but also strengthen your site for the challenges of tomorrow.

You can use third-party software like Mouseflow to track user behaviour and generate heat maps that illustrate how users interact with your website. This information is invaluable because it allows you to identify areas that need improvement, ensuring a simpler and more efficient user experience that guides users toward your desired outcomes.

Integration:

A well-suited platform integrates effortlessly with other essential tools in your business toolkit. This ensures that your website harmoniously complements your customer relationship management (CRM) system and other vital software, streamlining your workflow and enhancing efficiency.

But there's more to it – you also have the flexibility to try out new tools, such as the latest features from OpenAI, or include other essential tools that your business might need in the future. 

All of this can be accomplished without the need for coding or the necessity to switch platforms, as long as you've chosen the right platform from the start.

Support:

The right platform offers robust support, reducing the downtime your business might experience due to technical issues. This means fewer disruptions, improved customer experiences, and ultimately, higher customer satisfaction.

Let’s look at WordPress. Support is nonexistent. 

The only option you have is forums, and you have to hope that someone has already solved the issue. If you and your team are okay with that, then great; however, there are platforms that provide technical help and video documentation in case you encounter specific issues.

Customization:

It should be highly customizable to align with your brand's unique visual identity and cater to your specific needs. 

You definitely want to stand out, not blend in like a cookie-cutter company that shares its template with hundreds of others. This is the polar opposite of what memorable design is all about.

A tailored website not only attracts your target audience but also enhances user engagement, trust and makes your brand memorable.

Security:

Security is paramount. A reliable platform provides robust security features, safeguarding your website and customer data from cyber threats.

Those can be a huge pain to deal with.

There are platforms out there that don’t even require your attention to this, because they take care of all of that for you so that you can focus on continuing building your business.

Performance:

A fast-loading, responsive website is essential for retaining visitors and improving search engine rankings. The right platform optimizes performance, ensuring your website consistently delivers a smooth and enjoyable user experience.

Certain platforms don't offer much room for optimization. If they do, it's often very limited and can be challenging to implement without encountering some bugs here and there.

Content Management:

Adding new content or editing existing content needs to be effortless for the internal team. If you need a developer to do that or more than 10 minutes to upload content then you are wasting time. 

Cost-Efficiency:

A well-matched platform offers good value for your investment.

It minimizes unnecessary expenditures, as it precisely meets your needs without additional, costly add-ons.

Why would you opt for a website platform that drains your time and money to maintain? In 2023, that doesn't make any sense, unless your website platform is performing complex Web3 computations and so on.

Let me give you an example:

Many of our clients came to us seeking rescue—from WordPress.

Why did they want to migrate?

It's because as their website grew, it became increasingly difficult to manage.

It became slower, buggier, and disorganized.

At this point, no one wanted to deal with it, and no one was excited to publish new content on it.

Eventually, our clients needed a developer solely for maintenance, even though their website was primarily for lead conversion and content publishing.

The point I'm making is that you should find a platform that doesn't make you work without yielding additional benefits.

There is a 90% chance that your business spends time on website maintenance that can be avoided in the first place.

Choosing the right website platform can save you hours in maintenance and thousands of dollars in development payroll. So, take your time to go over every point covered above and make comparisons.

Step 2: Allow you & your team to rapidly make website edits internally.

Have you always wished your marketing team could create landing pages on their own?

The answer is to use a Design System. 

A strong design system empowers your team to make tweaks and create new pages without constantly depending on a designer or developer for every little change or new page creation.

No, matter how advanced your website design is, the website layout is made in a way that is modular and malleable by internal teams.

Regardless of how complex your website design may be, the layout is constructed to be modular and accessible to your internal teams. This means your team can craft new pages by reusing existing elements provided by the website designers and developers. This enables you to swiftly generate and modify pages without constantly involving the website developers.

In essence, a design system is the key to efficient and agile page creation, ensuring your team can produce landing pages efficiently while upholding brand consistency and design integrity.

 It's a strategic investment in your digital setup that aims for independence within your team, accelerates content additions, enhances the website for both your employees and potential customers, and eliminates frustration while speeding up all website-related workflows.

What does a website system look like? Here's an example.

Look at it as an advanced style guide with pre-styled elements ready for your internal team to use in creating new pages. This eliminates the need for your team to manually design new elements or create pages from scratch, reducing the risk of layout and design errors due to unfamiliarity with your brand guidelines and platform.

The result is a highly modular website that is user and team-friendly. Your website consists of sections composed of these reusable elements that can be rearranged as needed.

 Take a look at the example below. This Sideman page is entirely constructed from reusable elements. Once built, your company's primary focus is populating the page with the right content and text copy.

Step 3: Build Visual Branding for Growth

Designing your website to embody your brand's identity while remaining flexible enough to adapt to your business's growth is essential for a strong online presence.

It's not only about how it looks; it's about creating a website that can evolve alongside your brand's needs and goals.

To illustrate the importance of a strong branding foundation, let's examine a case where one of our clients struggled with their branding before undergoing a rebranding process with us (I'll maintain their confidentiality by not mentioning their name in this post).

When making website changes:

If they needed to create a new page for an ad campaign, the internal team was attempting to replicate their "brand" layout and perform the developer's role, which ended up taking them more than 2 days. 

And even then, the landing pages ended up ugly looking and visually inconsistent.

When creating other marketing collateral:

The team lacked knowledge about official colors, fonts, and illustration types.

Despite having no designers on the team (they were copywriters), they were improvising the design each time because they didn't know how their brand actually looked.

As a result, they spent time on tasks they weren't even paid for and executed them poorly.

You can imagine that the results were neither visually pleasing nor memorable.

When trying to establish professionalism:

Having different branding for your email signatures, social media posts and your website definitely doesn’t scream consistency. 

This doesn’t make the company look as established and serious. 

It seems like the branding was half-assed. That doesn’t give a good perception to potential and existing clients.

In short, the technical pros of branding are:

• Save an establishing amount of time for you and your employees when creating and updating your collateral.
• Easily create updates and add more elements to your website thanks to a solid branding foundation style guide.
• Avoid creating layout bugs on your website due to random development freestyling (which will take more time to fix later)

Basically, you and your team will SAVE time and move quickly without even needing to think about how your brand shows up. 

And, there is also the other huge benefit that comes with having a strong visual brand foundation. 

People will actually start remembering you.

As a little example, on our agency website, we have a 3D cube on our homepage that animates when the user scrolls.

Many of our clients remember us because of that 3D cube saying “I remember that cube rotating and stuff when scrolling”.

Little things like this make your brand memorable. 

The feelings that you communicate with your branding have a long lasting effect on users when you are consistent with those visuals.

Quite frankly, we know that it can be hard to quantify the ROI of branding. 

Once you do brand awareness surveys, your brand search volume (how many people are looking for your brand online), your direct traffic, referral traffic, then you are able to start seeing the effects of your branding in action. 

The more memorable your brand is = Higher Brand Search Volume + Higher Direct Traffic + Higher Referral Traffic. 

Quick Recap

By now you can see that if your website doesn't work for you then it works against you. 

The more you wait and let your website affect your workflows the worse it gets.

Here are the takeaways you need to retain:

• A design system empowers teams to create and modify web pages without constant designer or developer involvement.
• Design systems enhance operational efficiency, independence, content addition speed, editing speed.
• Design systems improve the website experience for users and internal teams, eliminating frustration and streamlining workflows.
• Selecting the right platform is crucial for scalability, integration with other tools, support, customization, security, performance, content management, and cost-efficiency.
• The wrong platform can lead to time-consuming maintenance and organizational hell.
• The right platform can save time and money, allowing you to focus on meaningful business growth.
• A strong branding foundation ensures consistent, professional, and memorable visuals across all collateral.

Ensure that your business fulfills all three of the criteria outlined in this post:

• Choose a website platform that caters to all your needs
• Develop a design system.
• Establish a strong visual branding.

The benefits of these actions include time savings, ease of updates, and enhanced user perception and recognition.

With these steps in mind, you'll be better equipped to transform your website into a valuable asset.

Let's say that you did all of the 3 steps mentioned above, you will still need to create or revamp your brand, design the website, and develop it on your chosen platform. You can do this yourself or hire an agency, such as ours. This decision is yours to make.

If you sense that your business is suffering from the negative impacts discussed in this post, don't wait for them to magically disappear because they won't. They will only worsen.

Don't fall into the trap of being like those business owners who fail to take action.