Thinking about your website

Transcript

Julie Stanford:  Thinking about your website. If you’re in business then the chances are you’ll already have a website but how do you make sure your website is right for your business and right for your customers? I’m Julie Stanford and a few years ago, I presented a show called Business As Usual for RadioReverb in Brighton. What my guests talks about then is still very relevant today. In this show, my guests and I are discussing what you need to think about when it comes to your business website.

 

The point of your website 

Julie Stanford:  Welcome to all of you. The reason I’ve invited you today is because currently, when a business starts out, the first thing they think about is getting their website.

What I worry about is that sometimes that’s done without thinking about what that website is going to do, what’s the point of it and really, I thought, the best people to ask are the professionals, hence, the three of you. As a business owner, I’ve decided I need a website, I need it to work for me. What frustrates you about working with people who don’t understand how important that is, Stuart?

Stuart Hill:  I suppose the first thing I would say to anybody who’s looking to get a website up for their business is to not lose the enthusiasm they had when they started their business. Because they were probably really excited at one point, they were jumping up and down just thinking, “Yeah, great ideas, great ideas!” and yet when they come to their website some of that might have rubbed off in the reality, and the realism of running the business and the tiredness and everything else. So you’ve got to try and get that excitement and interest into the content. That’s the first thing I would say.

I’d also say to make sure that once you’ve got that, be the technical expert that you probably are. The reason you’re starting a business is because you know what it is that you’ve been doing in work for some considerable time. You know that you’re going to go no further. You want to start your own business because you believe you can do better. That probably means you’re expert at what you do. Therefore, you’ve got to bring that expert knowledge into your website. Those are the first two things I would say to any small business, concentrate on what excited you about starting in business. Let’s get that, try and capture it.

Then what is it that you really know? Why are you so good at doing this? Why did you start that business? That’s where I would start from and try and get that down on paper to start with.

Julie Stanford:  We’re thinking then that we need to be clear about what it is we’re offering to the customer. Would you then suggest that someone should use a professional copywriter? Is that the first thing …

Stuart Hill:  Yeah, maybe.

Julie Stanford:  … they would do?

Stuart Hill:  I think, no. I think, the first thing you’ve got to do is try and get that down as to why you’re in the business, what is it that you know and then what you do is you sit down and you try and work out what the objective of your website is. You’re looking for “What am I actually asking people to do when they come to a website?” because the biggest failure in the websites that you visit is a website that has no call to action, absolutely nothing. You hit the website there’s loads and loads of pages with content overflowing the pages. You’re never going to read it. It’s not laid out very nicely but it’s a website that makes the owner of the website happy.

It doesn’t necessarily make their customers happy. A call to action would be something like “download a newsletter” or “sign up for a brochure” or “contact me”, “send me an email”. You have to have a set of objectives around your content to make sure that that works.

Julie Stanford:  So there’s a point to it.

Stuart Hill:  So there’s a point.

Julie Stanford:  Elizabeth, yes?

Elizabeth McLaughlin:  Absolutely agree with what Stuart is saying. Thinking about the objective of the site and your customer, your audience is so, so important and is often the case that one focuses on the business and “We do this and we want to tell people about it”. You need to think about it from the customer, the user’s perspective. What are they interested in? Why have they come to your site? Why might they come to your site? What are they going to do when they’re there and what are the aims of the site? It’s certainly something that we come across a lot. It’s the thing that we ask people to focus on is “Who are your target audience and what do you want to say with them and how do you want to engage with them?”

Julie Stanford:  It’s classic marketing questions, isn’t it? Just because it’s a website, it isn’t a different thing in that it’s still got to get that message across with the customer in mind. Because it’s a website, sometimes we forget that it needs to do that but the same principles apply as if you were doing a leaflet or you’re doing an advert, it still needs to be focused on your customer. Jeremy, what would you think? When someone approaches you looking to build a website, do you have a series of questions that you might ask them first to get them thinking about their customers?

Jeremy Spiller:  Yeah, I think the two elements that have come out already which are establishing the objectives of the site and what the purpose of it is and also establishing your target audience are very, very important. I’m biased because I personally think that a website is so hugely important and unfortunately, it’s often not considered that way. It’s just sort of “We do the event last month, we’re doing the conference next and we’re doing the PR after that. We’ll do the website this month”. I don’t think it should be looked it by that at all.

One of the problems is that the web’s now been around 15 years or so. In the first few years there were just a lot of “me too” sites going up – what would be called now brochureware or business card websites. There still is a lot of those type of sites around when the reality is that the more modern websites are much more interactive – what’s currently called Web 2 – and even small businesses can use that feature or that sort of approach very, very well indeed. As well as thinking about objectives and audience, I should also think very carefully about what, as you said, what people, what you want them to do when they get to the website.

Just a tip on that, a good way of finding that out is actually talking to your customers and talking to your prospects. There’s also a different approach. This is another point I want to make quickly. A different approach whether you are a startup business with no website whatsoever and whether you already have a website because there are very big differences in how you should approach that particular situation.

Julie Stanford:  I was thinking actually when we touched upon getting people to your site and we are going to talk about that next week because that’s a whole subject in itself, isn’t it? How do you actually encourage people to come along? I think there must be so many businesses who, having paid for their website, sitting there all beautiful and already thinking that because it’s there, people will flock to it. We are going to be touching on that next week but thinking then about the actual creation of it and thinking what job this website has to do. If when a client comes to you, Elizabeth, they ask, they come to you and they say, “I’ve got this business. I want a website” as well as asking them what their objectives are, what would you then be thinking they should be thinking about?

 

Preparing for your website 

Elizabeth McLaughlin:  I think that one of the things I think they should not be thinking about is I don’t want people to get too bogged down in technology. Oftentimes this happens where people come along and they start asking, they think they need to know about all the acronyms and all the jargon and all the, “Do I need to learn an HTML? Do I need to learn this and the next thing?” I think this can be limiting for people. They start to get worried about, “I must understand all of these in too much depth” where what they need to be thinking about continually is content, as we’ve said already, objective and so forth and the next thing is ask them to look at are how do they want to be presented specifically what tools they want to, what services and things they want to offer online. I always say don’t get too bogged down on technology itself. It’s an enabler rather than the driver

Julie Stanford:  Stuart, do you think it’s important that people have a clear idea of how the website will look at the end for you to be able to for your business to be able to build it well for them? Do you see what I mean? I’m sorry, I’m sounding a bit [crosstalk 00:08:15] with that.

Stuart Hill:  No, not at all. I think actually, most customers will not know what it’s going to look like. They’ll have an idea of what they want and they’ll say I know exactly what I want or they may even have sketched it down on a piece of paper but what we end up with is typically something completely different because when you got through that process of analysing, what is it they want to achieve through their website, you realise that the design that they’ve come up with and the page layouts and the navigations actually don’t match anything that they’re trying to achieve.

I think, another great feature of a website is for a lot of businesses where they’re trying to sell services, is that it takes away the selling aspect from the business. Because a good website, a well-designed website and one which some thought’s been gone into from brand people and from optimisation people is that, it’s a call to action. It’s a sale where the business owner doesn’t have to get on the phone and say, “will you buy this?”, because a good website will sell it for him and or her. What will happen is the prospects will contact the company which are already hot, which are already looking to do business.

It’s a phenomenal tool. What a lot of new businesses don’t understand that how powerful it can be. Jeremy actually touched on that, and it’s something which for a new business can be a really powerful sales tool. That’s what we have to try and leverage I think when you’re starting a website.

Julie Stanford:  But it’s also, it can also be a powerful way of getting it wrong if you see what I mean. If that website isn’t right for the customer or isn’t a good advertisement for that business, it can do enormous damage can’t it. It really is important, that a lot of thought and care goes into it.

Stuart Hill:  There’s a lot of tools available from the major Yahoo, Google, those sort of things where you can actually send out different types of content so you can say, “Okay, let’s see what works well”. Google have a tool. It’s free. It’s available. Anyone can have a look at it. What it allows you to do is say, “Okay, I’ve got three different ways I want to approach this” and what the Google tool will do is deliver each page to each next customer if that makes any sense. Over the course of the week or two weeks or three weeks, you can see which is the most successful page.

If you’ve got an objective, “We want them to click this link” by delivering three different pages, you’ll see which one gets most people clicking the link. I think the fact that it might be a failure in terms of what it tried to do when you first launched it doesn’t matter because websites are so dynamic, they’re so fast to chang and so easy to reshape that if you get it slightly wrong to start with, you can change it and you can make it work. That’s what these SEO guys are doing. They’re coming in and they’re looking at it and saying, “No, that’s not working. They’re not following the goal path. I’m going to change that for you and I’m going to put you down here”.

Don’t worry. I think, don’t worry about the initial design. It’s content and product knowledge and technical knowledge that’s king. What buyers want, what people who are reading a website want to know is “Does this company or this person know their business? How do I know they know their business?” They want testimonials on there. They want customer list. They want, “This is what I’ve done in my life and this is what I can do for you”. They want to be reassured that they’ve got rights on there as well. They’re going to want to know they are not going to be signing up to some great big, long-term contract before I know you can do what it is you’re saying you’re going to do.

If you can encapsulate all that, you’re going to have a winner. Our skills, I think, and the people around this table are shaping that, because business owners, they’re in business because they know what they’re doing. We’ve just got to take that and make it work within the context of the web.

Julie Stanford:   Elizabeth?

Elizabeth McLaughlin:  Yeah, I absolutely agree with what Stuart is saying there and also in terms of the content, it’s an interesting one that we always coming back to Google. I always say if you look at the Google site, what does it have? It has a search box on it because you go to that website to search. That’s what they’ve put on the homepage. We always take our clients back to this and say, “Yes, we can have lots of interesting things on your site but keep it focused. Your homepage, if there’s a specific purpose behind your homepage, make sure that’s really front and center more than with the best [inaudible 00:12:24] in the world, your pictures of your snowboarding or white water rafting or whatever, any team building exercise. That’s great stuff but it doesn’t need to be on your homepage”.

We always like to keep people back to the content as strip it down and make sure it’s really, really focused. That’s where, again, someone like Jeremy comes in tremendously well to be able to then focus the specifics of the search engine side of things to make sure that what is on there is concise and really fit for purpose.

Julie Stanford:   I was going to say, Jeremy, with your clients, would you suggest that they should be using …

Jeremy Spiller:  I think …

Julie Stanford:  … professional copywriters?

Jeremy Spiller:  In a sense, yes. I think one of the challenges for any site owner is that today, a site has to do many things. That is a challenge because a site in terms of user experience, it has to deliver. It has to have good conversion, good landing pages and so on. Also, if you’re sensible, has to appear well on the search engines because if you’re top of search engine of your target phrases, it’s also a very good thing. Also, it has to be interesting. The best two bits of advice I’ve ever read on, on, about websites are make it interesting and then tell people about it.

On top of that, it’s got to really look good as well. For a site to look good, have good user experience, be on top of search engines and be interesting does need a certain level of skill and expertise to do.

Julie Stanford:  I was going to say, no mean feat, really.

Jeremy Spiller:  Indeed. That is …

Julie Stanford:  No, I mean …

Jeremy Spiller:  That’s going to deliver you a nice lot of return for your site.

Julie Stanford:  Yeah, but as Stuart said …

Jeremy Spiller:  In your site.

Julie Stanford:  … it’s an organic thing, isn’t it? You don’t have to get everything… What we’re saying is you don’t have to get everything right from the off.

Jeremy Spiller:  I think, you don’t and in fact, you won’t anyway. Every site should be considered as an evolving entity in itself. It’s always, it’s the whole thing of tweaking all the time, looking at your analytics, looking at how you’re performing, looking at your conversion rates, doing your AB testing as Stuart suggested and then tweaking things and improving them all the time. I advise clients, I certainly do myself, I look at my analytics everyday to see how…

Julie Stanford:  By analytics Jim …

Jeremy Spiller:  … the site’s performing.

Julie Stanford:   … for everyone.

Jeremy Spiller:  Who’s visiting the site. Where they’re going. Where they’re coming from. What pages they’re going to see. How long they’re staying on the site. What they’re clicking on. All those sort of things.

Julie Stanford:  How would someone who has a website be able to do that?

Jeremy Spiller:  Google Analytics. There are multiple analytics packages but one of the best ones is Google Analytics. It’s completely free. It’s a stub of code put on each page. It can be done very easily, very simply and will tell you a whole mountain of useful information about what’s going on on your website.

Julie Stanford:  Gives you …

Jeremy Spiller:  Very …

Julie Stanford:  Gives you that kind of information that Stuart was talking about being able to test the different pages. You’ll be able to see by using that kind of analytic?

Jeremy Spiller:  Yeah. Google Optimiser is what Stuart is talking about. It’s basically a free tool. Google’s got amazing loads of free tool but one of them is Optimiser and it’s very good for basically multi-variant testing.

Julie Stanford:  If a business owner goes along to a web designer or web development company, what questions would you advice them to be asking the company? We’re hearing from your, obviously your skilled and experienced perspective here but thinking about people who are listening who either have a website already and maybe it’s not performing as well as they might like, or they’re starting out and need to get that all important website up and running, what would you suggest they should be thinking about when going to a web company? What questions should they ask, Stuart?

 

Dealing with web companies and agencies 

Dealing with web companies and agencies

Stuart Hill:  I would say first that if someone was going to be at that position where they’re going to start, the first thing I would say is go research your competitors. Standard marketing practice, go and and have a look and see what the websites look like for the companies that you’re competing against and that are doing well. That’s the first thing, because if they’re doing well, you can copy their ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that in marketing. You can have your web designer change it slightly. You can change the content slightly but if they’re doing it well, you do it too.

Everybody does this. I remember years ago, there was, in the credit card industry, one of the big credit card players spent about three or four million pounds on a branding exercise to find out what the best color would be for the credit card. One of their competitors knew that they were going through that process so just waited until their credit card came out. It was blue. Their credit card came out blue within a couple of months. There’s nothing the other company could do but all the research was paid for by them and they took advantage of it.

The first thing I would say is go research your competitors. Find out who’s doing well, copy them. What you need to be able to do is if you go, you need to go to a company rather than a web designer. I would say, you want to find a company that’s recommended to you who are more holistic rather than just design. You’re looking for a company that can help you with the layout, with the navigation, with the optimisation, with the implementation who can, not necessarily a big company. It could be a one-man band locally who can pull those skills in, who have got a relationship with a designer.

In our company, we don’t have a designer but we use a designer who gives us ideas of designs that we lay out before the customer. I’d say, go research. I’d say, find out how you want the look and feel to go. Try and encapsulate some content. You got to watch out with content because as Elizabeth said, you can have too much content. What I said earlier, get that excitement about why you are the technical expert, you are about your business, the general rules is once you’ve actually written than down on a page is to take half of it away and then take half of the rest away and you probably got about the right amount of text.

Shaping it up is really important. Yes, someone from a copywriting company would be a good investment, would be a very good investment. Yeah, take some professional advice but you can do it against the budget. There’s a lot of companies out there that will help you do this and do it against a budget. You know your business. You know how to sell your product. You know how to approach those prospects. All you’ve got to do is try and get down to the web. If you can do that, you’re pretty much going to be 80% of the way there. Everything we do really just tweaks it in and gets value for money, gets pound back for your spent pounds.

Julie Stanford:  Elizabeth, what would you, would you add to anything that Stuart said there about the questions that a business owner should be asking of a company they’re going to?

Stuart Hill:  Certainly, I would suggest the things you want to look out for when talking with an agency is that they should listen and you should really get a sense from them that they’re taking on board, understanding about your business and then going to help to interpret that for you rather than necessarily saying, “This is what we do and this is what you get”. They should really be interpreting what you’re trying to achieve as a business owner and as Stuart said, as the technical expert of your actual business. Make sure that they can, that you get a sense that they’re interested in you and also listening and are going to then interpret that for you rather than necessarily, for example, getting too hung up on a specific design concept or specific idea that may then be limiting in other areas.

We’ve seen that happen before where, again, as Stuart was giving descriptions of this, we’ve seen designs that are so very, very prescriptive that they actually don’t suit content at all and then the business owner is madly trying to strip out content far too much to extent where you’ve got a great big picture. That’s brilliant but it doesn’t actually, it’s not your business. It’s not going to get across your business. A picture can be transient and should be, it should change. Make sure that when you’re working with someone that you have a really, you can develop a really good long-term relationship with them. It should always be the long term and the evolving nature of the web. Because as Jim was saying, it does change and evolve and very much should. Listening and interpretation are very important.

Julie Stanford:   Do you think, Jim that also a web development company should have a good understanding of that business’ customer base as well? Because you could design the most fantastic website but if the customers are turned off by that design, then it’s not going to work, is it?

Jeremy Spiller:  I agree. I think you should also, the agency should be asking the right questions. You of course are going to want to ask questions of the agency but the agency should be asking the right questions of you. I also think that before you do any of this, think about a budget before you start any of this. Because there are certain agencies, if you go out there and you’ve got £500, you’re just going to waste their time. You’re going to waste more importantly, just as importantly your own time. Think about your budget. Whereas there are, you can get a website built for £500 whereas if you got a £100,000 budget, you might not want to use to the one-man band.

It is matching. You need to find an agency that you can work with that you can be matched with if you like. Part of that is budget. This is a reality of life but they should be asking the right questions. We’ve actually got a guide we send to potential clients which is called, Briefing an Agency. It’s literally a guide of things that we need to know because we need some form of brief. All agencies do and that can be done in multiple ways but the better it’s done, the less, the easier the project will actually be. Getting a good brief out of a potential client and a lot of people simply don’t know.

They’ve never written a web development or website brief before. It’s important that the agency are helpful in order to, if you like, get out of the potential client or the client the information that they need.

Julie Stanford:  It works both ways …

Jeremy Spiller:  Absolutely.

Julie Stanford:  … doesn’t it?

Jeremy Spiller:  Yeah.

Julie Stanford:  Because it sets the boundaries for both companies, for the web agency and the client. The boundary’s clearly set. I’m thinking about it from graphic design terms. It’s a similar experience, similar relationship in some ways when one is doing graphic design for a client. We used to be very clear about drawing that line and setting the expectation of how much this might cost because sometimes I don’t think the business owners realised just the work involved in some of the technical work involved in a website.

I think they think it’s a quick and easy change where actually it isn’t. Thinking then about the business owner coming to you with a budget, I know this might be a stupid question but for a small business, what would be a reasonable budget for them to expect to spend on a website or is that an …

Jeremy Spiller:  What, define small business.

Julie Stanford:  … impossible question?

Jeremy Spiller:   You could be talking VC-backed [Venture capital] …

Julie Stanford:  Let’s say .. .

Jeremy Spiller:  Someone who wants to do a set up, a database, large social media website, it could be tens of thousands.

Julie Stanford:  The average small business isn’t VC-backed. The average small business say, maybe one to five people.

Jeremy Spiller:  I reckon you’re going to be talking about a budget anywhere between £1,500 and £10,000. That’s where I would go. Less than 1,500, you’re talking, it’s going to be difficult to get what you need. If you’re a small business, spending more than £10,000, I’d be very surprised. I don’t know whether other people agree with that but I think if you’re a small business that’s the band that you’re talking.

Julie Stanford:  Elizabeth, do you think that’s reasonable?

Elizabeth McLaughlin:  I agree. Yeah, definitely. I think with the budget, it’s a case of being realistic and again, know that you’re going to get, you should aim to get good value but at the same time you should be spending an appropriate amount of money to get a really good site together and also allow for, make sure your agency will help you to see where the spend is and you need to allow for some elements further down the line that might crop up in terms of perhaps three, six months down. Because you’re going to be looking at it with analytics and all of these tools and reviewing the site and making sure that it is delivering what you want to achieve.

Therefore, to work within your budget, it’s always a case that is really important is to say – Stuart at the beginning was talking about, remember your creativity and your passion that brought you to develop your business in the first place. Keep hold of that, that’s fantastic. Brainstorm lots of brilliant ideas. Throw all of that out there with your agency and then take that list and structure it into “Here’s everything we’d love to have. Now, let’s start to focus that into phase one needs to be about what do we have to have and what is essential” and get that in there and make sure you can budget for that.

Keep the other stuff in mind because we should never lose sight of that good stuff. Often times, it can come almost out of the development of the initial work. It can then come along in a much more cost effective way but be realistic as well.

Julie Stanford:   I think that really builds on what you were saying, Stuart about it being an organic process. The original budget might be whatever it is whether it’s 1,500 or 10,000 or 100,000 each business will have their own budget that they can afford but they need to see it as an important area, an area that they need to invest in in the business nowadays.

Stuart Hill:  Yeah. It’s important to invest in it. You have to have it because it’s now the first and primary place that people will go to look at your business. If you say, “my business is such and such”, they’ll go and look at your website and you got to have something there even if it’s just brochureware, it has to be there. I think, I’m just hoping we didn’t turn off a lot of really small business people there by saying you need a budget of 1,500 to 10 grand. I think you can get away with less than that if you’ve already spent money on, for example, your logos and some brochures.

 

Doing it yourself

Stuart Hill:  You could, in that case, go direct to a designer and the designer would help you lay that out. I think one of the fantastic things about the web is a 12-year-old in a bed room could knock up a website that looks as good as the millions that ICI just spent on this. You would never know because the technology is very easy to use. The only difference between the two is that they will have had all of the brand stuff going on in the background making sure that you’re following the paths that they want you to follow where the 12-year-old wouldn’t have done.

No one really, I don’t know that anybody can get a degree yet in this. I’m not too sure you can go to a university and get a degree in the production of a website in a business environment. There’s a lot of self-taught stuff here going on. Obviously, in brand stuff, you can go to a university and you can get qualified and everything but certainly for stuff like optimising it for thinking about your goals and some of the standard marketing stuff. Small business could do a lot of these themselves. I would say that £500, I know a number of designers that would put together really nice-looking site. A couple of books of Amazon, we could recommend some,

the standard average intelligence small business could probably do it for less than £500 and get a website up there that works, that’s effective and will make money for them. If you plan in your budget over the course of two or three years to put some money aside, I think it’s eminently possible. I don’t think you have to go big and go, “I need to spend” if you’re a really small business. Certainly for businesses that’ve got websites that are established, stick a budget in, I would say, yeah, 1,500, 10 sounds good to me. I would say about five grand is probably the average that you’re going to spend.

It’s money well spent for sure but for small businesses, go for it. There’s books out there that will show you exactly how to do it. They give you top tips and you will be able to make a success of that website for sure.

Julie Stanford:  I think, also, we always have to bear in mind as business owners that if the return we get for the money we spend is more than the money we have spent then it is money well spent.

Stuart Hill:  It’s a no brainer. That’s exactly what you want.

Julie Stanford:  If a website cost me a quarter of a million but you’ve made me half a million, I’d happily spend the quarter of a million. It’s all to do with what’s it’s doing, what’s it bringing back into your business? I suppose the only thing as a designer is I used to get a lot of clients would come to me with something that it looked like a 12-year-old had put it together and they had no understanding of design or the customer’s desires or what they might like. They would bring it very proudly and put it on my desk and say, look what I did using a piece of desktop publishing software and it made me want to weep sometimes. They were so proud of it. “Look what I’ve done”. “Yes, you shouldn’t have”, I wanted to say but of course I couldn’t. Yes, Stuart.

Stuart Hill:  What I said about the 12-year-old, I’ve seen some sites that have been produced by youngsters which is absolutely phenomenal. They’ve taken the technology. I know professionals do a better job but what I was trying to point out was that if you are a small business that you can, for example, get templated options off the internet for free. There are sources of free hosting, free layouts, free implementation that you could just take straight off the back end and work with if you don’t have a budget. Now, as much as we want a business to put a budget together, if they’ve got small business. It’s been in business three months. They don’t have a cash flow they need, £1,500 is a lot of money. They want to get a website up, you can do it for nothing, literally.

Julie Stanford:  I think, also, as Elizabeth said, this is a relationship you’re starting here isn’t it. When you first start that relationship, sometimes you have to take it slowly. It might be that you do one thing first and then you move on and you grow but it’s the value as web agencies or web development companies or whatever to collectively call you. The relationship you’ll have with your clients is going to be a long one hopefully, isn’t it? That’s the point of it. Your clients will gain from that experience and knowledge as they grow.

 

Final tips 

Julie Stanford:  We’re coming to the end of the time. I always ask you to finish on a tip, really, wouldn’t I always? Jeremy, do you have a top tip for someone who is either got a website that is looking a bit lack luster or they’re starting out?

Jeremy Spiller:  Indeed. Whether you’re building a site with the free tools available or whether you’re spending the 10K or the 100K or even the half a million, my tip is plan it. That’s the thing to do. The more time you put into the planning of the site and getting the structure and all of that, setting the objectives and the content, the more planning you do upfront, the easier the development will be downstream.

Julie Stanford:  Stuart, what would you give as your top tip for someone listening?

Stuart Hill:  I would say, just to go back to the conversation we’ve just had about making a relationship with brand people is, if you’re working with the right person, it will be like having a new marketing director sitting on your company. That’s when you’ll know you’ve got the right person to work with because they’ll be understanding your business. They’ll prompting you to think of new ideas and they’ll be pointing your business in particular directions. If you don’t get that sort of relationship then you’re with the wrong person.

Julie Stanford:  Elizabeth to end on, what would be your top tip be?

Elizabeth McLaughlin:  I would say, be open. Be open to ideas. Be open to, and that would be ideas working with the agency designers, anyone that you have in the process but also with your team, with colleagues. Keep checking back with people. Testing is the other thing. That’s not just about technically testing. It’s about what does it feel like? What is the experience of it? At the same time stay focused, get it launched, get it out there.

Julie Stanford:   It’s clear that also maybe you could ask your customers what they think when you launch it and be ready to hear what they have to say. Be open to changing it which is all part of this organic growth of the site. You don’t have to get it absolutely right at the beginning. It’s a work in progress together with your agency.

This show was originally recorded for Business As Usual on RadioReverb. I’m Julie Stanford. Thank you for listening to Essential Business Radio.