An interesting thing happened last night Image may be NSFW.
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that I would like to share.
I arrived home having finished my working day of providing SEO and was settling into the sofa with my girlfriend and our cats. As always, I was forced by said girlfriend (forced I tell you!) to watch something called ‘The Chaser’, swiftly followed by something called ’Antiques Road Trip’. They aren’t really to my particular taste, but I put up with them anyway.
However, in between the programmes was something that I could get my teeth into – a party political broadcast. I, following politics quite keenly, exercise my right to vote and so take great interest in these things. This particular broadcast was stimulating enough that I decided to visit the party website, read about their policies and find out who my local representative is. I promptly hit a brick wall. What content there is on the site all relates to 2011. Every last bit of it.
This got me thinking. This party wants me to vote for them to manage and organise my societal affairs. The want me to trust them with my life, my family’s life and the well-being of my society, yet they can’t be organised enough to even update their website, their shop window, to let me know who it is I need to vote for. Why on earth would I vote for them? Why would I buy what they are selling?
I visited their website to find some answers and they haven’t provided them. Worse still, they served me up a load of out of date information. Having come to their site looking for reasons to vote for them, I instead have found reasons not to vote for them.
Imagine if, instead of visiting their website, I had popped into their office. Based on their website, the conversation would have gone a little like this.
ME: Hi. I would like to know about who my local representative is please?
THEM: Can’t tell you.
ME: Well how about telling me what your policies are for this upcoming election please?
THEM: How about we tell you about last year’s policies instead?
ME: But that doesn’t help me. I am interested in voting for you but want to know who to vote for and what you stand for. Can you help me please?
THEM: Nope.
ME: …
And so we come back to the content problem. Your website is the shop window of your business and if you don’t update your website and provide the content that visitors are looking for, it is akin to owning a shop and not putting anything on the shelves. People can come into your shop and look around, but they won’t know what you sell or whether they want to buy it.
It doesn’t matter whether you are in a service industry or a retail industry. It doesn’t matter if, like a charity or political party, you don’t trade anything. Yours could be a community hall website or the website of a large international corporate. If you don’t display up to date content about what you sell, people won’t and can’t buy what you are selling.
