The thought of putting the content together really scares me

Chantal Dawtrey — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 14:46:04 +0000

Now you have published a book, you really should get a website for yourself," I urged a friend. “People need to find you. They need to know what you have done and what you can do."

"Oh, I don’t know," she responded pulling a face, "I then have to get all the content together. I don’t think I have the time and inclination."

This coming from someone who had recently completed her PhD, written a book and was a coach, lecturer and facilitator of several leadership development programmes. She wrote all the time. She had the content. She probably had too much content.

And another occasion, another colleague, "Made a decision about your website yet?"
"Oh, I don’t know. I’m so not tech savvy," she responded, hunching her shoulders, and squinting her eyes, "The thought of having to get the content together…."

She too writes content all the time. Content for training programmes and the various services she offers. Content to get accreditation and tender for business. She has the content. She probably has too much.

Easy to follow guidance

What both of these potential clients need is some easy to follow guidance on what is required for their websites. They have all the content they need. It’s just stuck in their heads or in many other documents prepared for many other reasons. They just need a way of simplifying it and presenting what their clients will be looking for so that they can find them quickly and easily. Isn’t that the purpose of a website, after all?

In our experience less is more. People don’t read much these days. They want short, bites sized content that gives them answers to their questions they have. Questions about the service or products they are searching for. Their questions will be about what is on offer, what problems it solves, how to get it, how it works, how long it will take, what other people think of the product or service and how much it costs. First and foremost clients will want to know how much it costs.

Purchasing domain names carefully is a very important aspect of owning a website. Having a website is an important part of running a business. Make sure you are the rightful registered owner of your domain name.

Provide prices and educate

Rule number 1. If you don’t put your prices on your website, your potential clients will probably go elsewhere.

Rule number 2. Your job is to educate. You may know your business, services and products inside out, but do not assume the same of your clients. Do not assume they know where you are, if you are a handyman, for example, your clients will want to know what areas you work in. If I search for “handyman services near me” and you are near me, you may want your website to pop up. Yes?

Painting by numbers

At Tech Warrior, we provide our clients with an online scope and content document that they work through. This document helps them think through all the elements of a website and its content they may not have considered. Like including your address so Google can ensure you pop up when searched for “near me”.

It asks the questions that our clients’ clients may be wanting answers to. It gets our client to look at his or her website from the point of view of his or her client. It’s a bit like painting by numbers for website content.

A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
—Zig Ziglar

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Does my website need to look like everyone else’s?

Tristan Green — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 14:23:02 +0000

Why we design the way we do

When buying a new car there are some things I can change and customise to suit my needs, preferences and budget. These include things like metallic paint, alloy wheels, sunroof, heated seats, a more sophisticated media player and so on.

What I can’t change is the basic structure of my chosen model of car. For that matter I can’t even change the overall setup of a car. The position of the wheels, engine, steering wheel placement and number of doors is fixed.

The same applies when it comes to choosing one of Tech Warrior’s Small Business Website versions. The overall setup and structure of the website is fixed. You can customise how it looks and add in various options to best suit the needs of your business and brand. But you can’t have something that is designed from scratch to your exacting needs.

The reason for this approach for all of our client websites is due to the following three reasons:

Overall cost and price
Your time (and ours) is valuable
Content and lack of content

The elephant in the room – cost

Our websites may not be the cheapest but they are definitely not the most expensive and that’s the point. What our website offers you for the price you pay supersedes anything we’ve seen available on the market.

Our websites aren’t hardcoded which helps bring the cost down, mainly because we don’t have a sleep deprived, green tea-fuelled programmer sitting behind a screen making sure an image is placed correctly. We utilise a nifty drag-and-drop system which means if there’s a heading you want where a picture is, we can edit and replace it without hassle.

The aforementioned ties into all of Tech Warrior’s websites. They are all built using the same basic framework, honed and perfected over the 25 years we’ve been building websites. In essence it’s a completed website with everything we have to offer pre installed - it’s our custom WordPress theme - ready to go, again, bringing the cost down. All the website needs is your customising and branding which means content, specifically text and images.

We offer different packages to cater for your budget. If at the beginning of our relationship you only have a budget for a one paged website, but want to upgrade to a five or ten pager at a later date, we’ll be there to help set everything up so that you can expand when you are ready to. Head over to our website pricing page and take a look at the different Small Business Website offerings Tech Warrior has.

The most valuable commodity – time

One of the more important aspects of our website building process is that we don’t want to waste your time and, equally, we don’t want to waste our time. This is why we do our best to engage with you, helping you get your content in order so we can launch your website quickly and smoothly.

We do our utmost to achieve this by creating online documents you can complete, with the guidance of a Tech Warrior team member, that will help you write great content. This means you are able to give us something to work with!

Website content checklist

To streamline the start of this process we provide you with a checklist – making sure you have a colour palette, hero images, gallery images, write ups for all the sections on your site; all we need from you is to be met 50 percent of the way by providing us with all the necessary content needed for your website. This process helps reduce how long you spend writing and providing content and how long Tech Warrior spends building and populating your website with said content.

We can have a website up and running within a very short space of time (especially compared to a more conventional website development process) provided all content is supplied, on hand and no major changes are requested.

Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.
—Bobby Unser

Meeting us at the halfway point – content

If writing content isn’t your thing, that’s okay. More often than not, people believe they need to have this near perfect level of content in the first draft: zero typos, no grammatical or punctuation errors. This puts you under unnecessary stress and pressure, besides all of Tech Warrior’s content capturing is done online. This means we can assist you every step of the way from start to finish and mitigate the stresses of wanting perfect content from the onset.

Planning out what needs to be said on your website should be top of mind when you’re generating content. Are you descriptive enough for people to understand what it is you and your business have to offer? Are you able to solve the issues and problems people have? After all they’re visiting your website to see if you are the best choice for them. If you have a minimal amount of content which doesn’t capture your audience’s attention, chances are your website isn’t going to be as successful as you’d like it to be.

Tech Warrior always provides its clients with a foundation to build from - we’ll provide guidance where needed, but we need something to work with in order to help you deliver the best possible content.

Your site may not look entirely different to one of our other client sites, but it will be yours in a unique way.