Over the last few weeks I have visited various caravan websites trying to figure out if they actually spend much time or effort on their sites. Not surprisingly, most don’t.
I must have visited 200 plus Caravan Websites and the only website I found that I thought was reasonably decent was the Jayco Caravan Website.
If they ditched the flash based website, and implemented any SEO, as opposed to ‘none’ like now, the site could actually be quite good.
Do it Right
If you are in the caravan industry and you are going to bother to build a website, at least do it properly and make sure you have some level of standards that you expect the website to meet.
And by standards, this is what I mean:
The website has to at least look reasonable:
- Don’t use pixelated and poor quality images.
- Don’t use animated images with little working men, wielding shovels… This wasn’t even cool in the 80′s.
- Please stop using massive big bright colorful fonts… This has never been good.
- Make sure the website loads in all web browsers.
All the pages need to load properly:
- Most of the sites I visited had broken pages, broken images and broken links.
- Several of the sites didn’t actually load at all.
- If you host your website on a cheap hosting provider, chances are the website is going to down, more than it’s up.
People need to be able to contact you:
- I shouldn’t even need to say this, but make sure your contact us page does actually work. I went to one companies website (they have three) and not one of theor contact forms work.
- This paticular company is easily in the ‘top 5′ caravan manufacturers in Australia.
Put your email address on your site or at least put your phone number down and put it in an easy to find location.
- Do not use your mobile phone number, it will make you look like a one man operation.
- Get a 1300 number. They’re cheap and they’ll make your company look as though it’s an Australian wide company.
- Go easy on the ‘spam prevention’ – the more hurdles you make potential customers jump, the less they are inclined to contact you.
Getting to my point(s)…
Creating a website isn’t a build it and forget about it job.
And building a ‘professional website’ generally isn’t overly expensive either either.
Insiteful can easily build a caravan website, for some where between $5000-$10,000.
And from what I’ve heard and read, caravan manufacturers should easily re-coup this cost by selling even ONE caravan.. Imagine the return on your investment if you sold 20?
Conclusion:
- If you are not going to do it right – don’t bother.
- If your website is not up to scratch and represents your company poorly, get rid of it before customers go elsewhere.
- When you build your website, keep it up to date and keep the content fresh.
- Customers are now more than ever using the Internet to search for new Caravans, according to hitwise – 82.9% of all consumers use Google to search for Caravans!
- Make sure customers can actually find you online using strategies like SEO.
- If you do not have the time to manage your own site, find a company (like us) who will gladly take care of it all for you.
Whilst I realise this article may come across as quite offensive, it was not intended to do so.
I wrote the article in an attempt to offer a better insight as to what the caravan industry is doing wrong in relation to their website, and how simple it is to improve the problems.
I welcome anyone to call me on (1300 467 483) or email me at paul@insiteful.com.au to discuss this article!
All the best.
- Paul Warren.