You Can Build A Better Website

Your Website Should Not Be About You
Website content should highlight how you can help customers, not about what your company does. We will go over a checklist of five items to help you transform your site into one all about you and your company into one about your customers.

As a business owner you are proud of your product, their features or services you offer. It is what sets you apart from your competition. Unfortunately customers won't buy something because it has the biggest or fastest widget.

People buy benefits (to them) not features. If you are familiar with basic marketing this is not new to you, marketers are always talking about the difference between features and benefits.

Some might claim that there are some people who buy products because of features. Sports car advertisements talk about horse power and computer ads talk about RAM and CPU speed. While that is true, they are still selling benefits to the customer.... More Horse Power = You can go faster  / You can brag to your neighbor that your car has more HP than his. CPU and RAM = You don't need to wait for your computer.

Checking Your Website

Let's take a look at your website and see if it is touting benefits or features.

Open your website in your browser and look at the home page.

1. A larger portion of the home page content is devoted to lists of services / features that your company offers: (Database programming, Flash Animations, Printing on Canvas, File Backup ...)
2. Many sentences include the word "we" or "our".
   Do you talk about how skilled, experienced and knowledgeable your employees are?
3. Few or no sentences contain the words "you" or "your".
4. Quotes or news on your home page from your president or about your company.
5. The first navigation link on your site is "About Us" , or it is the second link, because "Home" is the first link.

How Did You Do?

Did you only answer yes to one or none question? Congratulations, your website probably does a great job explaining why clients should use your product or service.


How many of these questions can you say yes to? Was it more than half? Your website is not doing enough to explain how you can help your clients.

Improving Your Site

Improving your website is simple, but not easy. Change your content to target new or existing clients, by telling them the benefits of your products or services.

1. Instead of listing features list the benefits.
   Database programming = You can change content or add pages yourself without paying a developer.
   Printing on Canvas = Turn your image into a work of art that will last 100 years.
   File Backup = Never worry about loosing files if your computer crashes.
2. Change your content so the words "you" or "your" occur more often then "we" or "our".
   Whenever you have a sentence that has the word "we" ask yourself what is in it for the customer. Try to write content that shows how it affects your clients.
3. Use quotes (Testimonials) from your customers. Include news about how you are helping clients.
4. Change your navigation order.
   Put the links that are important to your customers first.

Another area to look at is product or service detail pages. These pages usually tout features, not benefits. But I'm not going to address that topic. Plenty of people have written about features vs benefits. If you want to read about that topic Google marketing features vs benefits.