Design And Build An Effective Exporter Website

NZ Exporter Magazine recently invited Adhesion to contribute to an article on designing and building an effective website for NZ exporting businesses.

Websites that are effective can help SMEs reach the global market without blowing the budget and let them respond to customers far quicker than their bigger, bureaucratic competitors.

An export website built three years ago is unlikely to be reaching all its potential customers, according to the company that got the country's biggest exporter online.

Paul Russell of Auckland, online marketer and site designer at Adhesion, also downplays the importance of social media compared with doing the web basics well. For an exporter, Google Analytics is an essential service for understanding diverse customer wants, and whether a site is catering to them.

The free Google tool, which Adhesion can build into any site, will tell the site owner from where and how visitors got to the site, and the order in which they made their way around it.

"It can be as simple as looking at a content report in Analytics and being able to say, 'we had a view that our target audience wanted Product A but in reality they're all interested in Product B'. "Then you'd ask yourself whether the website was set out in a way that was meeting customer needs."

Google Analytics provides a free means for a customer such as Pumpkin Patch to find out which colours of its children's clothing range do well in particular markets, Russell says.

"It's a free service and it's inexcusable for a business not to have it to see what's going on with its site. If an exporter doesn't have it it's a good reason to refresh their site."

Read the full article on the NZ Exporter site.