New Year, Old You?

So, here’s an important business website element.
As part of proving you’re running a legitimate, active business your website, amongst other essential elements, should display the correct date – this might be a copyright or ‘last updated’ date, usually located in the website footer.

If I visit your website and scroll to the bottom, what year is displayed?
By now it should display the current year. It does? Great.
Nice work and I’ll revisit soon.

If it doesn’t, read on.

Being online, for a business, is all about showing the world that you are alive and being productive, it’s all about having a product or service to sell and importantly about being transparent.

Gone are the days where you could simply call yourself A1A1 Plumbing Services so you were listed as the first plumber in the Yellow pages, now you have many, many others to compete with – a1a1plumbers.com, .co.uk, .biz, .plumbing – now you need to prove you are real, trusted and alive.

If I want to spend a substantial sum of money with you, I’m going to carry out due diligence first by checking your website for your business details and one of the first things I’m going to check is the copyright date in the footer of your website.
Why so? Well, this lays the foundation of proof that you are more than likely to be still trading, that you are alive and that I can, possibly, still contact you. If the copyright date says something like 2011 rather than 2021 are you still in business? Are the details on your website up to date and still relevant? Hello? anyone in?

The thing is, if your website is built correctly updating at 1 second into the New Year should be an automatic process.
If not, how much will your web developer charge you to change it?
Even worse if you’ve tens, hundreds or even thousands of pages, if it has not been built correctly, each will have to be manually updated taking time and therefore costing you money.

Other important elements to include, to prove you are a legitimate business – some a legal requirement, some, aesthetic – include:
– Address – this could be your office address, but also needs to include a registered company address. If you run your business from home, and don’t want to display your home address, look to getting a virtual address. You could also speak with your accountant about using their address for the registered address.

– Telephone/ contacts – Speak with your clients to find out the best way they want to contact you. This might simply be by telephone or email but also these days people are using messaging apps more and more – WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Signal etc.

– VAT/ company registration number – If you run a limited/ VAT registered business, there is a legal requirement to display these details on your website. They don’t need to be on every page, just on the ‘contact’ or ‘about us’ page is fine as long as they are easily accessible.

Before you rush off and spend with your current web developer, who should know better by now, check for alternative solutions and get your website built the right way, preferably before next year.