When you’re building a website for your business it’s common to want a page for adding company or industry news and in many ways this can be a good thing, but not always. In this article we look at why having a news area for your building or construction company might benefit you or might become more trouble than it’s worth.
Plenty of website visitors have a quick click on the news page if a website has one, but not necessarily because they want to read the news. More often than not they just want to glance at the headlines to get an idea of the sort of things your company is involved in and how much effort is being put into the website. A news page filled with stories that are published regularly gives a great impression that you are running a busy trade and are serious about keeping your site up to date which can really help them decide to choose you over a competitor.
Writing content for your website is not easy and often takes a lot of time to get right, but a short news article can be written in a tea break if that’s all the time you have. And even though it’s only a small piece of content it all adds up and will help attract new visitors and win new jobs.
If there has been a recent breakthrough in building materials that you use or a new construction technique which has become popular then writing a news article on it shows that you have your finger on the pulse and know your trade well. This can impress your customer and inspire him to buy even if the article is not relevant to him. For example, an electrical installation business might release a news article about a recent change in some obscure industry regulation. Even though a visitor to your site might only want a plug socket replaced, reading about how you are aware of some complicated regulations shows him that you are easily capable of handling his job to a high standard.
News pages are expected to contain a jumble of different topics in date order with little or no options for categorising them. On the other hand, pages and articles are usually expected to have some sort of organisation structure to them, and this takes time to decide on and set up. It’s often easier to just write a news article and bung it on the site compared to adding a page or article just because you can avoid having to organise it.
As a general rule, larger companies are more likely to have news sections on their websites than the one-man-band tradesmen and small building companies. You can use this to your advantage and give the impression of running a larger company by simply having an active news page which may help land some larger contracts or attract higher paying jobs.
Even if you enjoy writing company news there will certainly be moments when you’re short of time or there’s simply nothing to write about, and during those times writing news articles can be an utter pain in the arse.
You know what’s far worse than not having a news page? Having an empty news page. As I mentioned above, most visitors check your news page to see if you’ve been adding news rather than actually reading it, and an empty news page shows that you can’t be bothered to add to it regularly. If you can’t commit to writing company news regularly then you should not have a news area on your website.
Some UK trades will have no problem writing news articles that interest and attract customers while others won’t. And if your business genuinely has no news that will interest any customers then I suggest you skip the news area and focus on adding content to other parts of your site instead.