Stafford Wood Outlines Successful Web Strategies in Business Report

Covalent Logic Owner Outlines Successful Website Strategies in Baton Rouge Business Report

Covalent Logic founder and CEO Stafford Wood shared her successful strategies for building a better website for your business in the recent Greater Baton Rouge Business Report. Wood believes there are six basic things websites do. Pick one or two to be the focus of your website and you’ll be walking on sunshine. Check out the full feature below.

Stafford Wood explains the best ways to build your business’s website

JUNE 10, 2015

Baton Rouge Business Report

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Business owners frequently approach Stafford Wood with this problem: “My website isn’t working.” When she asks them, “What is it supposed to do for you?” she is often met with a blank stare. Too many businesses build a website with conflicting goals, or worse, no goal at all. Wood, the founder and CEO of Baton Rouge-based Covalent Logic, an integrated communications firm, offers these six strategies for making your business website more effective. Wood suggests that following even just one or two of these strategies can help you make quick decisions that are effective for your business.

1. Provide information: The most basic of all strategies sometimes gets lost. If you hear people saying, “I can’t find that on the website” or “my search never works,” then you’re failing to provide the expected information for your employees, customers or stakeholders. Fix it by considering each audience and what they need from you; organize it into clear, precise navigation labels and you can absolutely win with this strategy.

2. Reinforce your brand reputation: Your website’s aesthetic should reflect your authentic brand identity, not just have the right logo and colors (though that’s a good start). Should the voice be friendly or formal? Should the photography be welcoming or efficient? Should the layout be simple or elegant, modern or traditional? Every element of the website is saying something about your company. Make sure it’s speaking the way you want it to. If your brand is “easy to do business with,” you shouldn’t have 1,000 pieces of information on your home page. Choosing this strategy means others can’t trump it because it’s unique to your brand.

3. Entertain your audience: You don’t have to be YouTube to find a way to provide sincere or humorous videos, blog posts or cartoons for your customers. Building an entertaining content stream will be like having your own publication, but it can also be a highly effective way to have a “sticky” website with frequent repeat visitors.

4. Support customers: People frequently expect to get service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If your website is optimized to allow them to do it themselves, then your salesmen and customer service representatives can focus on those who need specialized help. The key to this strategy is your receptionist, or whoever answers the phone most often. He or she knows exactly what your website should be able to do to keep the phones from ringing off the hook.

5. Increase transactions: Whether it’s e-commerce or email sign-ups, with transactions as the main goal, it’s amazing how many companies have never analyzed a user’s pathway to find out how the transaction was completed. Make it simple, easy and clear how to do something, and visitors will be more likely to do that thing. Be sure you’re continually monitoring your click-paths and adjusting for frequently abandoned pages and those with unusually long visit durations—these make it more difficult for your customer to complete his or her transaction.

6. Build a community: If you build it, they won’t come. You have to work a community site for quite some time before you hit the magic number that makes it virtually self-sustaining. Creating a site with a strong community means increasing crowd-sourced content and peer-to-peer interactions and having easy posting tools likely integrated with one of the already strong community sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Disqus.