Web Design in Oklahoma City

This is part one in our series on "Getting results from your website." In this article, we're going to talk about using your website as a hub.

What is a hub?

One of the first steps any organization or business must take toward getting results online is to recognize that the website should be the hub of as many of their activities as possible. What do I mean by "the hub?" I mean that the website should be the first thing you think of when you are trying to accomplish something. Let's look at a few examples.

The hub of communication

Communication is an obvious place to start. Your website should be the hub of your communication. Lots of businesses have printed marketing materials. Print is sometimes needed, but you ought to also have those same pieces electronically available in pdf format. Then, you should put those pdfs on your website and refer to their location on the web as the primary location. If anyone is looking for any document that you make publicly available, they ought to be able to find it on your website.

If you email the pdfs to people as they request them, that's not using the website as the hub. If you email them a link to a place where they can find all of your documents, that could be even better. Why? Because it keeps your employees and your customers thinking of your website as the central place to find the information they need.

The hub of other activities

But there's more than just communication that can be carried out online. What about support? Where do your customers go when they need support? Perhaps your website should have a support page that aggregates all of the support information they need into one place. Perhaps your should have a form users can fill out to request support. Whatever resources you provide, determine if you can provide them effectively through your website.

How about archiving? If you are a non-profit or a church, this can be especially important. You have lots of public documents such as minutes from meetings or official records that need to be archived. Do you store them in files in your office where people would have to physically come to your location to find them? Why not archive them on the web and train yourselves and your members to view your website as the central place to find the archived documentation.

Push the limits

These are just a few examples. Your business or organization will have lots of additional needs that might even be specific to your line of work. The point of this article is to get you to think about your own organization and find the places where you can push more emphasis toward making your website a hub. Make it the first thing you think about when you're looking for a new solution. The more you do so, the more your own people and your customers will begin to regard your website as something of great value — and that is the first step toward getting results online.