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

Would you fire them? Try and motivate them? Get them to see how much more their fellow employees are doing and try and get them to “get on board”? Or do you just let them be?

But what if that “employee” is your website? It looks good, brings in some business and presents your company in a good light. So now what? Do you get complacent, letting it just sit there, or do you try to make it work harder?

But how? 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 phone number or email address?

You should occasionally find your competitors on the search engines and really look at their sites. Take 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. Keep going. Find something else on the site you like, or go on to the next site and see if there is something special about it. This shouldn’t take long, but even if it takes an hour or two it will be well worthwhile.

Now take your list and email it to CityCenter Co. 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.

You need to get the most out of every employee you have, flesh and blood or cyber. So look them all over and start those pep talks.

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