Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Flick open a Marketing or IT magazine for small companies and you are likely to find an article offering advice to organisations about their online communications strategy. Terms like SEO, blogs and Adwords are used, but if you can’t get the basics right then what use are any of these tools?

The amount of company websites that either don’t have contact information on their homepage or bury them in their website is astounding. If I take the time to look for a plumber online, find a website of someone I want to hire and then can’t get in touch with that person so I can hand over my hard earned cash, then that plumber has got a big problem.

I’m not going to name names, but as a PR practitioner I use a lot of photographers. When I go to their websites in a bid to try and find their contact information to organise a job, but can’t find it, then they end up losing money to a competitor.

Worse yet are companies who include a contact me page on their website that when you click brings you to a form to fill out. If I’ve taken the time to click the contact me button, then it’s pretty obvious that I might want to contact you instantly. The lack of a telephone number is absurd.

I think a lot of people need to take a step back from their website and stop thinking of it as a space rocket and think of it as a good old fashioned ad in a newspaper. If the information you want to get across in a couple of inches in a newspaper isn’t visible on your homepage, then it’s time to get back to the drawing board.

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