Understanding The Value of Your Website

Your website has value.  It’s worth something to you to have it online and working well.  It’s important to understand what that value is when deciding what to do with your website.  Maybe you’re thinking it’s time for a redesign, or that you want to move to another platform.  Before you do, pin down what the value of your website is.

Determining value

This is going to be different for everyone.  It depends on your business and online presence, among other factors.  The value of your website could be monetary or social.  A monetary value would be how much money your website makes you.   It’s worth to you what it can deliver in sales.  A social value (as I’m calling it) is what you see your website’s worth in terms of popularity and presence.

Social value

Let’s imagine that you have a website for your business, but it is purely informational.  You don’t make money off the website itself, but you really want to spread awareness of your services and get people to share your website and remember it.  If you were to hire someone to redesign this website, they might suggest improving the visual design to make it more unique and memorable.  They also might suggest building a responsive design, making it easier to access on mobile devices and easier to use.  There in lies the value.  With a sharp new design, and improve usability, your website now makes a bigger impact on its visitors and has become simpler to use and likely to be shared; and that’s valuable to you.

Monetary value

Let’s now imagine you have a website for your brand.  You sell hats.  Your website looks pretty good, and you don’t want to stray far from what you’ve got.  However, you’re not getting as much traffic as you’d like and visitors are not converting into customers.  Now you want to hire someone to improve on these pain points.  A good UX designer might suggest a landing page with an incentive and clearer call to action.  This new page will produce measurable results and get the conversions you wanted.  The value of this design is that it makes you more money than before.

Why a website’s value is important to understand

Determining the value of your website will help when deciding why to make improvements, and who to hire.  Ideally when you’re planning to hire a developer or designer, it’s because you need to improve something.  Understanding the value is key.

The above are just two examples of how to value your website.  You very well might discover a different value in yours.  Do you value your website differently?