But, like that brick and mortar storefront, the impression that you’re website leaves on visitors is going to have a big effect on your online profitability. If things look clean and orderly, your shoppers are going to have a good experience; if not, they’re going to spend their money elsewhere.
With that in mind, here are five signs you should think about upgrading your business’s website:

1. Your business has changed, but your site hasn’t.

It’s amazing how many owners make major changes to their companies – including the products they sell, prices they offer, or even the business name – without ever updating their site. If something in your business is different enough that you would want new customers to know about it, make sure the changes are reflected online.

2. It loads slowly, or not at all.

In theory, a website should keep working for a long, long time. But the reality is that changes to the product pages, updates to content, and movement of the files from one domain, hosting service, or software platform to another can all leave parts of your site not working as well as they should be. Obviously, this isn’t good for business. If your website isn’t functioning as it should, get a professional designer involved sooner rather than later.

3. It looks old.

Cyberspace is littered with pages that looked cutting-edge five or ten years ago, but seem severely dated now. If yours falls into that category, it might be a good time to look into upgrading. A tired looking website tells customers that your business isn’t fresh or growing – not exactly the impression you want to create online.

4. You aren’t generating any leads or online orders.

One of the top benefits of having a website in the first place is the revenue or leads that can be generated 24/7. If your site isn’t equipped or persuasive enough to bring in orders (or at least leads), then you’re probably missing out on business that you could be getting with a simple e-commerce package.

5. It doesn’t get any hits.

Search engine marketing and optimization are big topics, but they both come down to being found by visitors. At a very minimum, you should be driving web traffic from your local area and existing customers. Thinking bigger, your site could attract customers and orders from around the world. A quality designer can help you take the first steps to increasing your reach online.
Deciding to upgrade your website is never easy, and it’s one that many marketers and business owners put off for fear of high costs and long meetings with lots of technical words. But modernizing your design doesn’t have to be a chore, and if your site suffers from any of these symptoms, you should act quickly to stop your company from losing money and market share.

Word of mouth, paradoxically, is one of the oldest forms of advertising. As long as there have been brands, people have talked about them, both positively and negatively. Yet it is only in the past few years that a diverse range of marketers have begun to make it a regular staple of their brand strategies. For one thing, it is relatively cheap. More important, it is trusted.

“It totally outweighs all the other forms of advertising and marketing direct in terms of trust,” said Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research for PQ Media. A recent survey by A.C. Nielsen found that 78 percent of respondents viewed recommendations from other consumers as trustworthy. That compares with 63 percent for newspaper ads, the second most-trusted medium, and well above the 18 percent for text ads on mobile phones.

Trust, however, can be a double-edged sword. Nothing can kill a brand faster than bad word of mouth, precisely because feedback from other consumers is viewed more credibly than a conventional piece of advertising.

On the one hand, it’s flattering that our industry, advertising, is first in one area: as a leading indicator of the nation’s economic health. I only wish we didn’t owe that position to being first on the chopping block when our clients look for ways to improve a sagging bottom line.

More disturbing was a decrease in ad revenue for the second consecutive quarter—the first time that has happened since the 2001 recession.

One bright spot, however, is projected to be direct mail — especially data-base direct mail that drives viewers to personalized URLs (PURLS). Universal McCann recorded that 2007 national direct mail budgets grew by 7.5 percent, and direct mail is expected to be a growth media for 2008. A recent Pitney Bowes/International Communications Research study found that “73 percent of consumers prefer to receive product announcements and offers via US mail from companies they do business with.” And the Direct Marketing Association recently reported that nearly 40% of consumers prefer to respond to an advertisement online, making PURLs an area of deep interest for marketers. Other predicted bright spots in ad spending will be: outdoor, cinema and some newer media and event marketing.

Which brings me to the topic, “What Is The Value of Advertising During an Economic Downturn.” Read the uploaded file!