When people look for information about businesses, one of the first places they go to is the Internet. If a business does not have a web site, it loses money because the business can't be found by potential customers. Having a well-designed web site is critical to attract those potential customers and make it easy for them to do business with you. Storitz.com learned just how important that well-designed web site is.
Storitz.com is a one-stop shopping experience for finding storage units across the United States. It was launched in September of 2010. While the site traffic was growing, the company wasn't happy with the performance of their web site. They decided to do a total make-over and create a new site.
The company hired a new Chief Technological Officer, Charles Hornberger. Hornberger had an impressive background: working on the product development team at AT&T Interactive and working for yellowpages.com. Working with Storitz senior engineer, Jason Meade, Hornberger created a totally new website that improved the user's experience. The user interface was simplified and more intuitive. The rental process was simplified.
Hornberg did a great deal of user testing so he could get feedback on how the site worked and how it could be improved. He also used site analytics to evaluate the site and determine how it could be optimized.
If you are the owner of a self storage facility, you should have a well-designed website for your business. To determine if it is good or not, you need to know the statistics about your site. Check with the company that hosts your site to see what method they have for gathering statistics. (Many hosting companies use AWStats.)These statistics tell things such as the number of visits, the average time people spend on the site, the raking of the pages viewed (from most viewed to least), and the words used in searching the site. Statistics can even show which browsers and operating systems are used, mobile traffic (such as iPhone, iPad, Android, or Blackberry) that accesses your site, and amount of traffic on different days of week and peak times of the day.
If your hosting company does not have a program that gathers data, you can use the free Google Analytics tools. Google Analytics gathers the information mentioned above in addition to tracking sales and creating a variety of reports. These reports can be exported in various formats (such as Excel).
Sources Used:
"Storitz.com Unveils Total Redesign." Digital Journal; 23 August 2011.
"Importance of a Website for a Business." Pegasus InfoCorp.