Five Reasons Why Websites Still Matter

By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|September 13, 2011

You know you must leverage Facebook, Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing to increase awareness of your brand. But the fact is, websites remain infinitely more popular with consumers than all of the business pages on social media sites combined.

Only 22 percent of those of us online in the U.S. visit a branded social networking page such as those found on Facebook, while 62 percent of us regularly visit branded websites, according to the latest Global Web Index report. If you were starting to let your site become outdated or haggard, consider a refresh. After all, as these figures note, websites still matter.

Here are five reasons why you shouldn’t ignore yours:

1. Branding: Since it’s your site, you set the design, which affords you the flexibility to optimize the user experience in ways that directly support your business model and brand-related goals. There’s no competition on your website, just a branded experience that you direct yourself.

2. IT and Engineering Jurisdiction: When you control your own site, you have complete jurisdiction over its code, hosting environment, page count, content, plug-ins and more. Just as I mentioned above with regard to branding — here too you have the elasticity required to make small or sweeping adjustments at will, an advantage you don’t get with third-party websites. With sites like Facebook, you can change minor graphics and some content but not code, navigation scheme, server speed or the graphic user interface.

3. Content: Speaking of content, more of it can be found on your own website than on a third-party utility or platform, and none of it competes side-by-side for your visitor’s attention. Create compelling and useful content that speaks to…

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