September 2017

... that counts. Results matter. What results are important for you? What are you trying to accomplish with your website?

What matters for one organization may be irrelevant to another. What is the overarching biggest need you are trying to solve with your website? Here are a few we've seen:

• Sell more products
• Establish credibility, be a trusted authority
• Inspire interest in working for the company, recruiting
• Persuade people to donate to a cause
• Get people to sign up for a membership
• Connect with other people in a neighborhood
• Increase registrations for a class, program, session
• Streamline online payments, make it easy for existing customers to self-register and pay
• Reduce support costs, provide online chat and ticketing
• Drive more traffic to support advertising
• Provide a communications channel to a particular group
• Unify information coming from a bunch of different sources into a single dashboard

You might have two or three goals for a website, but the more you try to do with it, the harder it is to make it fully effective.

We have so many tools at our disposal to measure things today. But there's a trap -- sometimes we all get focused on measuring things that don't matter at all, simply because they are easy to measure. Does the number of Twitter followers you have matter, if nearly all of them are bots who are never going to come to your site? Does the amount of traffic you get matter if nobody ever buys from you? Does the number of contact form submissions matter if it's all spam? Perhaps... but probably not.

There are definitely a few key metrics that are broadly useful, at least to see overall trends. Pretty much every site cares about unique visitors, number of page views, and bounce rate. Beyond that, though, there is a huge amount of variation around what metrics you should care about, and that depends far more on what challenges your business or organization currently has. Are you looking for new customers? Are you trying to increase engagement with your current customers? Are you trying to reduce costs? Are you trying to create something new? Are you trying to increase satisfaction? There's going to be some way to measure your effectiveness -- and what you pay attention to is generally where you'll get results.

Introducing the Freelock Vision Plan

We're applying this same concept to our own business, with this key question: How do we help our clients drive better results through their websites? And our answer is to develop automated tools that cover the basic needs across all sites, look at a single topic each month across our entire portfolio, and leave a little time to  focus on what makes your site unique.

We start with a site assessment, asking about your goals for the site and your organizational challenges, and then go through your site and rate it across some key areas: Effectiveness, Security, Performance, Scalability, Maintainability, Accessibility, Ease of Change, and Expected Lifespan. As part of this assessment, we uncover parts of your site that might cause problems when doing any work on the site, as well as providing independent feedback about what might be improved to make the site better accomplish its goals.

Once we have your site fully set up with analytics and an understanding of your key metrics, our vision plan delivers 3 things each month:

1. Month-over-month changes on your key metrics, with some analysis to identify what looks to be working, and what's not so much.
2. Topic of the month, and how your site stacks up. Example topics include: mobile performance, website accessibility, data security, SEO/SEM best practices.
3. Recommendations. Each month we look for 2 or 3 improvements to make on your site, which we feel will help the site accomplish its goals, lower potential risks, or reduce costs.

Paying attention to your site can make a huge difference in how well it works for you. And we would love to partner with you to help drive results! We're currently pricing this at $799/month.

Introductory Special - $2400 value!

To kick off our new offering, we are offering 3 months of our Vision plan free, for the first 5 customers who sign up with a Site Assessment before October 15, 2017! Contact us if you would like to be one of them!