It’s pretty likely that, at some point in your journey as a business owner and entrepreneur, you’ve spent a late night hunched over a calculator or spreadsheet. Learning to understand the numbers – and occasionally beat them until they give up their secrets – is a critical skill for anyone who wants to remain profitable.
Guess what? That’s part of the web design process, too.
Of course, this is contradictory to what most people think of when they envision designers and creative firms. They prefer to think of offices where people wear jeans and T-shirts, sipping lattes and playing video games until that moment of inspiration comes. There certainly is some of that in this field, but the hard reality is that unless your website is making money, it doesn’t matter how creative your team is or isn’t.
For that reason, here are a few things to consider and calculate as you figure out what to include in your next web design:
What would a small percentage increase in sales mean to you? Rather than thinking of “pie-in-the-sky” possibilities, get conservative and decide what a 1 or 2% increase in sales would mean to your bottom line. If it would be a big deal, and if you are reasonably sure that adding to your site could help get you that, then it’s probably a good investment. If it takes something a lot bigger for the future to be worth it, move forward very carefully.
Could this part of the site help you save money? A lot of bottom-line improvements are not immediately evident because they don’t add to revenue or new accounts. But anything that helps you save time and money – especially with customer service, billing, etc. – is still helping you keep more profits.
What about the long-term? There are millions of ways that small improvements to your site can help you make more money in the months and years ahead, but don’t fall into “every day” categories. Recruiting is a good example: having the ability to post jobs on your site and get the right kinds of candidates could save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years, but it isn’t something that a lot of business owners would think of right away.
When it comes to figuring out whether or not a part of your new website is going to be worth the investment, take a careful look at the numbers… and the numbers behind the numbers. A lot of costs are a lot more justified than they seem at first glance.
And then again, some of them aren’t. That’s what we are going to look at in the fourth and final post in this series.
Want to work with Calgary’s best web design and online marketing team? Contact eKzact today to see how we turn Internet dreams into bottom line realities.
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