After months in hushed development, we have released a powerful business tool to address a growing and insidious digital issue that many small businesses are facing every day. HighlyLikely’s objective is to solve the “stale website” problem that is affecting so many SME websites.
We address this growing problem by allowing business to update their existing website and their social media pages from the same simple account. We see this as an innovative approach to offering small businesses the digital support that they need.
Most small businesses now have a digital presence of some kind – a simple website and a Facebook page. While keeping the Facebook page up to date is generally an easily achievable task, updating the website is much more difficult and time-consuming. So much so that it often doesn’t happen for long periods of time. In fact, according to CCIQ’s 2016 digital readiness survey, over half of businesses surveyed go for over a month without updating their website and 12% never update their website at all. This is just not good for business
Highlylikely essentially creates a customized feed space on the business’s website. Each time you add or edit a post within your account, your website is instantly updated. Businesses can adjust the display to fit in with their existing website – the shape, colours and even font can be customised.
Following the simple step-by-step instructions on the webpage, you simply copy and paste your HighlyLikely code into your website once and you are set for instant updates.
The goals we had in mind when creating HighlyLikely were simple – we wanted it to be so easy that anyone can use it. In fact, I was the test model because I have very limited tech-skills! We want everyone to have the ability to keep SME websites relevant and tell the world what’s going on in their business every day.
Keeping your website up to date and relevant is so important – to attract new customers, to keep existing customers interested and to be better friends with Google.
Think about it – if you are looking for a new place to go for dinner, most likely, you will turn to Google. You want to see a website that tells you about all the exciting things happening in a restaurant today, this week or tomorrow. What you don’t want to see is a website with out of date information and stale content. Sure, that restaurant may have all sorts of things posted to their Facebook page, but you would never know, because you are looking at their website. That restaurant has just missed a new customer.
The reasons for this stale website epidemic are pretty simple. Updating a website can be time consuming and costly for a business – particularly if, initially, the business outsourced the development. Businesses are left with a website that they cannot alter or update easily in-house, and potentially face high fees if they revisit the developer for a content update.
Even if the website has been created by the business owner using a template tool or CMS like Wix or Weebly or Squarespace, revisiting those template dashboards can get tricky and time-consuming. On a deeper level, sometimes finding and creating a whole swatch of “fresh content” is a task in itself.
We believe that it shouldn’t have to be difficult to tell the world what is going on in your business. Everyday, there are things happening in businesses that are interesting – could be a live band coming in on the weekend, could be a new craft beer pouring, a new hair cut and colour package, half price on gutter cleaning, maybe it is even just a new sandwich on the menu.
Whatever it is, those small things can be just the boost the website – and the business – needs.
Simone Joyce, CEO and Co-Founder, HighlyLikely
