A slick website captures leads

DUO has been a prominent supplier of memory, storage and security in New Zealand since 1996. Our website was almost that old too. It was a traditional late nineties static design that did little for our business. So, we decided that we needed to drag it into the 21st century. It’s easy to get lost when you’re designing a new website. So many options, so many designers and developers, so many different strategies to consider. It pays, then, to cut out the clutter by focusing on exactly what your business needs out of the site, and ignoring the rest.We started by talking to our customers about what they wanted from our website. Overwhelmingly the feedback was, "tell us what products you distribute and give us the tools to learn about them online”. Our customers wanted to be able to get pricing in real time. They also wanted to see stock availability. This surprised us as we expected online ordering to be the number one request. It was a very valuable reminder that you should never assume you know what your customers want.From there, we looked at competitors and other vendors’ websites, noting five or six things we liked and five or six that we didn’t. We looked at all different types of sites, not just in IT, and we paid close attention to who designed them. You never know where you might get inspiration from.What did we want out of the site? We wanted to tell the Duo story, and let our clients know what products we were offering. We also wanted it to attract other vendors when we were pitching to them. But more importantly, we wanted to share our knowledge and build our community.To help us do this, we needed to interact with our clients and their clients through social media. Social media is an important component of website design now - it’s an enabler to reaching more than just your direct clients. To reach the widest audience possible, we wanted to interact with our community through twitter, blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn. To be able to communicate with them on every level, we needed content sharing tools like, blogs, eBooks, white papers, business case studies and on-demand video.Our challenge is that memory is easy to explain, but security and secure storage are not. Knowledge sharing is therefore very important to us. Our goal is to turn this challenge into a positive. When visitors receive something of value from visiting your site they want to do business with the company that educated them