How do you motivate your employees? How do you keep them up to date with new technology?

Say you have an employee who is “just doing their job,” making you some money, doesn’t embarrass you but isn’t putting forth that extra effort to create new business or learn anything new to better service to your clients. What would you do?

You could fire them, but that means all the time and energy you’ve already put into them goes with them.

You could try to motivate them. Get them to see how much more their fellow employees are doing and try and get them to “get on board”.

Or you could just let them be.

Now what if that “employee” was your website? It looks good, brings in some business and presents your company in a good light. But is it doing all that it could? How do you find out? It’s not a flesh and blood person you can sit down and give a pep talk to. You can’t ask it to look at what the other employees are doing, or to “try a little harder”. Or can you?

True, the website can’t look at what other websites are doing, but you can. When was the last time you checked out your competitors’ websites? Are they doing something on their sites that you should be doing on yours? Does their homepage explain their services better than yours does? Are their product pictures clearer, or presented in a more attractive or eye-catching way? Is it easier to find their contact information?

We suggest you occasionally search for competitors. Go to Google and search your keywords and see what comes up. Now look at their websites. Take a good look. Not just at their design, but at their functionality. Take good notes. Any time you find a feature you think would make your site “a better employee,” write it down with the URL of the page you found it on. Then keep going. Find something else on the site you like, or go on to the next site and see what’s special about it. This doesn’t have to take long, but even if it takes an hour or two it will be time well spent.

Now take your list and email it to your web designer. (You can use sales@citycent.com if you can’t remember their email.) We’ll look at the sites and the various features to determine how best to incorporate them into your site. Then we’ll put together our recommendations and a proposal for implementation.

Get the most out of every employee you have, flesh and blood or cyber. Look them all over and start those pep talks.