Surface Ripples

Are Websites “Out of Fashion”?

I find myself asking this a lot in the market in which I work.

To explain: the population of the country in which I’m living and working is around 460,000. There are very few “large enterprises” employing 50 people or more.

Most businesses are in the MSME (Micro/Small/Medium Enterprise) category.

Designing and maintaining a website cost money.  I’ve designed one myself using a provider that offered templates, etc, so that all I needed to do was produce the text and pictures, set the order in which I wanted pages to appear and then load them up for public view.  I still had to pay an annual fee to keep it online...

Every month, I diarised to update certain pages with news, events, whatever I felt important or noteworthy.

This was for a one-person business.  Now apply that to a large organisation with 100+ employees actively promoting different lines of business, events, newsworthy activities and so on and you find you need to employ at least one person to make sure the website stays up to date.

Add to that the increasing legal and regulatory demands on businesses that handle personal data belonging to their customers and you may need legal and specialised technical expertise to ensure that everything “as it should be”.

Small wonder than that many small businesses living “hand to mouth” don’t do it.  It’s uneconomical and demands time perhaps better spent selling product.

Instead, they use Facebook, Instagram and any of the other instant messaging services to promote themselves.  These may well appeal to the younger generation who are far more tech-savvy and tend to use this type of service far more than the “traditional” internet.

The constraint with such services is that they offer much less flexibility on how you promote yourself. Whilst a website allows you to have any number of pages you like (provided you pay for them!), many of the social media services limit you to posting photos.  I’ve had quite a few problems checking to see if a business provided certain products and have been faced with a “wall” of pictures of different products, forcing me to “doom scroll” to see if they have what I need.  I usually look elsewhere as a result. 

Going back to the point I made about increasing regulation: how do you handle this on social media? The very fact that you might have a “Broadcast List” on WhatsApp, for example, means that you have personal data stored on a device that can be lost, stolen or otherwise tampered with.

The same could apply to a website.  We’ve heard before of “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDS) attacks on organisations who have managed to displease some group or other as well as the “hacking“ of mainframes that contain customer information.

Technology provides a degree of flexibility and increased ability to reach out to a larger potential customer base but comes with its risks.

Back to the question of are websites “going out of fashion?”  I’d say that, for large organisations with thousands of customers and a heavier regulatory load to bear, they’ll remain.  Interestingly though, the younger generation tend not to think of checking to see if a website exists but rather goes straight to social media. In this sense, maybe they are going “out of fashion” but they still provide a comprehensive guide to a business, its values and service.

In short, a website does have its place and can add more value.  The question is now: Will people think to look for one? 

I deliver change in markets ranging from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management.  I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. 

Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Selling

posted by William Martin @ 11:35