During my marquee career having a website has gone from being a luxury to an accessory to a necessity. It’s how a lot of people get their business and it should represent the face of your company you wish to project. Here’s a few tips for your website, each one can be summed up by the words ‘Keep it simple!’:

• Text on the homepage should be brief and to the point. The fact the company was set up by your great-aunt Marge 100 years ago should go on the ‘about us’ page. There’s 2 techniques for keeping the text brief:
• Write out everything you want to say and then delete any unnecessary words. And then do it again and again replacing or deleting words to make it more and more concise
• Use bullet points. Eye catching and easy to keep concise
• Put the area you cover on the home page. Don’t assume people will contact you to find out – if a customer finds a website that specifically says they cover ‘My Town’ then they are more likely to go there than try elsewhere.
• Keep navigation simple, marquee hire websites don’t need to have a lot of pages so they should all just be one click away from the home page. At the minimum have a link back to the home page on every one of your website pages (who knows which page people will arrive on depending on what they search for)
• Have a large photo gallery. Once a potential customer has established that you cover their area they will nearly always go to your gallery. They’re looking for the kind of work you do and ideally to find the exact marquee they want to hire (then they know they’re not wasting their time). For this last reason it is often worth separating the photographs in to different party/wedding/BBQ galleries
• Don’t use a website made of just flash (a type of programming), you can do lots of cool things using flash (like our interactive planner) but search engines can’t read it so it’s useless in the search rankings. Use html for the bulk of your pages (nearly all template sites do)

Thanks for reading

Spencer