If you find yourself looking enviously at your competitor’s website and fretting your’s isn’t as good, then you’re not alone. According to a new survey more than a third of people think their closest competitor’s company website is better than their own, giving rise to something known as ‘web envy’. 
One in five people (19%) don’t actually think their own company website represents their brand. Yet nearly a half (46%) of people say they would consider not even doing business with a company that had an out of date or hard to navigate website and a third (38%) of people would be put off working for a company with a poor web presence, signalling significant revenue and talent loss implications for UK business.
The stark findings, from a nationwide study by Decibel Technology, provider of specialist software for web development and website management, show that a third (30%) of people put their stale company websites down to clunky content management (CMS).
Companies who do want to make changes to their web presence, however, are potentially being thwarted, with the process for signing off of budgets for website development taking up to one year for 54% of people and between one and two years for 18 per cent of them.
“Web envy is good if it inspires businesses to maximise the performance of their own website but the consequences of not acting on this are rather more sobering. What these findings really dramatize is that UK business could potentially be losing hundreds of millions of pounds by deflecting their trade – and even talent – to the competition,” said Ben Harris, Managing Director, Decibel Technology. “UK businesses clearly understand a website’s influence on potential customers and recognise that competitors’ websites are often much better but in many situations have their hands tied because they haven’t got the right software in place to do anything about it – or budgets are being approved too slowly.”
Decibel Technology, launched this month, provides a suite of website management tools and services to rapidly build, manage, enhance and future-proof websites. Decibel, has been created to make buying a CMS easy and to give businesses of all sizes access to powerful, enterprise level tools in a simple to implement way. Importantly, the software construction means that updating a website – its navigation, structure, content or even design – can be done using the CMS rather than purchasing an entirely new website.
Commenting on the research findings, Ben Johnson, Technical Director, Historic UK, the internet accommodation directory for heritage accommodation said: “Our web site is our business and it has to work incredibly hard to engage customers and drive revenue. We looked at many CMS offerings, and the flexible nature of Decibel appealed to us. The easy-to-use framework and CMS will allow us to grow the website and add on new capabilities as we need them, so we hope to never need to build a new website from the ground up again.”
Other key findings from the study, conducted among 1,222 people holding senior management positions in IT and marketing in the UK, indicate that companies are not armed with enough information about website build and management, leading to unneeded cost.
46% of websites have been overhauled in the past 2-3 years
51% of people agree that a company’s website influences their opinion of an organisation
Reasons companies cite for having to overhaul or rebuild their company websites –a rebranding exercise (37%), a change of focus in the organisation (38%) and significant growth in the organisation (32%) – all activities which don’t require companies to start their website from scratch if they source the right CMS in the first place
More than a third (36%) of companies say there is too much complexity surrounding CMS, making selection and purchasing hard
Harris concludes: “More companies should recognise at board level that websites need to generate the best ROI possible over the longest period possible. Putting software in place that help them squeeze more leads and sales out over a much long period is now the game they should be in. The good news is the technology pendulum has dramatically shifted and Decibel is designed to do just this.”
About Decibel
Decibel Technology delivers a suite of content management tools and services to rapidly build, manage, enhance and future-proof websites. Decibel CMS provides a powerful yet practical alternative to current open source and proprietary CMS on the market through its Open API, which allows developers to build high performance websites quickly and easily. For the first time, Decibel, brings enterprise-level CMS and website performance enhancing concepts to businesses of all size and budgets. With headquarters in London, clients include: Lavendon Group Plc, Bell Education Services, Historic UK, Marshall Wace and Miss World. www.decibeltechnology.com
