It’s been a while since my last involvement with a business website. Recently, I traded my service for lessons and subsidy for competitions of my ballroom addiction, and now I’m up to my ears with hands on implementation of facebook page, web redesign, and overall online presence improvement. Wow, do I have my eyes opened.
Just to consolidate all the facebook pages that were created and never used or maintained took weeks. Facebook itself was not helpful at all. Reports sent in have never been answered. But little by little through perseverance and focus, we finally got to the bottom of all the unused pages, some created out of ignorance, some created out of good will. To add to the complication, the business was using a personal profile instead of a business page. Converting it to a business page took a lot of tries. The multiple pages created presented the biggest challenge. Facebook will let me initiate the conversion and at the last step, threw up its hand and said ‘Oops, error encountered’. No explanation of why and how to remedy the situation. A new page appeared ready to be setup instead and no conversion completed. But then a couple of days later, it magically let me go through the whole process. And gave us a new business page with all the followers intact as likes. Don’t know how or why. But I’m happy it worked.
After the conversion, the process of having a plan for posting took some efforts too. Being new to the business side of social media, I’m very careful not to over-post which usually alienates the followers and leads to losing the audience. And I constantly need to play the gatekeeper for the enthusiastic owners wanting to send the same post multiple times. At the same time, I’m feeling my way trying to find a good balance of interests and solicitations. Give and take of the game. It’s all interesting and fascinating to me. So far, I’m loving the challenge and wondering why I never paid attention to this side of online engagement years ago. I may have enjoyed it and stayed involved longer years ago in the web world.
Learning ‘about’ SEO and responsive web design is also both overwhelming and interesting at the same time. I know I will never master SEO to offer service, but getting to know more about what makes a site tick and stay relevant in the google search world is helpful still in the day to day maintenance of the website and for the redesign. Having an eye catching website is only half the battle. That helps when the audience arrive at your site. How to bring them to your site is the other half. How to combat the one or two bad reviews you inevitably get when running a business is also very challenging. Catchy negative title for a bad review invokes curiosity of anyone who is looking up your site on google for example. They tend to click on it and makes Google think that page is more relevant. This is frustrating for the business owners and people like me who try to help them build a positive image and bring in more business. Currently, we are dealing with a negative article written by Plain Dealer of an employee who has left the business years ago. But the article stays up and high in the search result with our business name. Even though it is not relevant to the business any more and only hurts the reputation, of course, Plain Dealer won’t take it down. It creates hits for their site for sure. How do you deal with this but trying to build current and more relevant pages and information to counteract the negative influence. This is an uphill battle and there is no easy solution. I learned the importance of being aware of the content you put out there and being responsible for it. Sometimes you have in your hand the livelihood of some one else.
Redesign is another big project. Trying to keep all that matters incorporated into a website is a mind boggling job. And I am walking slowly into this. I’m sure I will learn tons in the end if not in the process already.