IF YOUR WEBSITE is more than a few seconds old, chances are you’re already thinking about rebuilding it. And, at the rate technology evolves, you’re probably already way past due. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you proceed. If you accuse me of serving up basic “duh” type information in this post, I don’t disagree. The more I travel, consult, speak and take questions, the more I become convinced that it’s the basics that are most important and most often overlooked.

Bank Website Must 1: Make the site SEO friendly. Write your content so that, besides being readable, it cries out for organic search success, over and above taking other SEO measures. Take this post as an example. I have worked in the phrase “bank website must” ten times, and not by accident. You can bet that, not long from now, anyone searching that term will find me. Nor will any search engine penalize me for it, because the way I have handled the repetition is reader-friendly and legit.

Bank Website Must 2: Have relevant content. Don’t settle for lifting content directly from a brochure or ad. That’s more than lazy. It’s a wasted opportunity and it fails to connect. Web content must instantly engage and hold your clients in an environment full of people vying to steal their attention. You have to fend off not just other banks, but email, instant messages, alerts, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. There is no better fender-offer than relevance. Note: relevance is a moving target (see Bank Website Must 5).

Bank Website Must 3: Don’t make your clients work. They should be able to execute a buying decision with no more than 1 or 2 clicks. In many cases, regulations and other complications may not let you do something quite so nifty as Amazon’s one-click purchase option, but it’s not a bad model to emulate.

Bank Website Must 4: Strive for accessible and clear design. Menus should be easy to find, succinct, and helpful. Links and buttons should be where eyes naturally gravitate. They should perform the way intuition expects. On the other hand, you don’t want your website to be pedestrian or boring, or to give your brand that fresh-from-the-stone-age look. You’ll need to master the fine art of balancing functional design with creative flair and technical wizardry.

Bank Website Must 5: Update, update, update. Trust me on this: no matter how many people proofed it how many times, hidden throughout your site are sundry typos, bad links, and incorrect or outdated information. Combing through your site on a regular basis provides an opportunity to hunt down and fix these little nuisances. But it’s more than a good quality control measure. Crawlers favor frequently updated sites, so you’ll help yourself organic-search-wise. And, because public tastes are fickle, frequent reviewing and revising also increases your odds of staying relevant (see Bank Website Must 2).

Bank Website Must 6: Never stop testing and optimizing. Once you have a killer site that’s up and working, congratulations, and do not even think about resting on your virtual laurels. Now begins the task of finding ways to make it work better and smarter in an ever-changing environment.

Bank Website Must 7: Use outside resources. Face it. You’re busy. And you’re hunkered down inside the walls, virtual and literal, of your bank. No matter how informed you strive to be, you cannot stay up on all that’s happening in your own vertical, much less in others. And don’t make the mistake of consulting only technical folks. There are technological dunces out there who nonetheless offer expertise in mass behavior, strategy, creative copy and design, data crunching, and more. With apologies to the egos of your doubtless extremely capable in-house people, don’t limit yourself to just them. Surround yourself with experts of every ilk.

It only sounds apocryphal

Here’s a true story about judging by appearances. It sounds apocryphal, but you can verify it for yourself, as I did, with a visit to Snopes.com. Snopes, a reliable resource for verifying or, depending, debunking urban legends, is where I found this true and instructive story.

On a work day, you could easily mistake building refurbisher John Barrier for a homeless person. Perhaps that was the impression he created when, in late 1988, he stepped into Old National (now U.S.) Bank to cash a check. A teller cashed his check but wouldn’t validate his parking. Validations were for bank transactions, she said, and check-cashing didn’t count. Barrier summoned the manager who, looking him up and down, backed up the teller. “Fine,” Barrier said, “you don’t need me and I don’t need you.” Barrier, who had been with Old National for 30 years, moved his business to nearby Seafirst Bank. His first of many deposits was a mere million dollars.

At the shallow end, the lesson here is “treat people well despite appearances because you might find out they’re rich.” But I’d like to go to the deeper end and suggest that we should treat people well because it’s the right thing to do. Whether or not they turn out to be rich.

At first blush you might think interactive banking should be incapable of judging clients by appearances. But the digital experience is becoming increasingly personal. It may not be long before camera-to-camera use becomes the standard for interactive marketing. Now is the time for a bit of preventive maintenance as we mind how we engage across all channels.

Funny thing about interactive media. They’re not free. That, however, is not the funny thing. The funny thing is that, somehow, users think they’re free.

You can hardly blame them. Site after site serves up information and applications galore at no charge. The idea that someone paid millions of dollars to provide those “free” services is lost on them.

This is partly due to the fact that we’re not prescient. Had we been, we might have figured out that providing some free services would create an expectation for more free services, which would, in turn, make “free” the industry standard. And we might have foreseen that once users got it into their heads that there was no need to pay for interactive services, getting them to pay later on—and like it—would be next to impossible.

Mired in the days when there were fewer bank services on the table and loan revenue allegedly covered them all, many people haven’t adjusted to fees for checking and savings, much less more costly-to-provide financial services. Banks and credit unions that continue giving away their services enable clients to remain blissfully oblivious to the fact that providing services costs money, that someone has to pay for it, and that loan revenue alone doesn’t pick up the tab.

So it was that, in the early days of online banking, a few brave banks tried charging for it, but pressure from competitors that didn’t charge forced their capitulation.

Given the fast-growing, dog-wagging tail that mobile banking has become, and given that developing an app can cost upwards of one to five million bucks, the cold, hard reality is, we cannot keep giving this stuff away.

Some institutions beg to differ. They maintain that giving away mobile services will pay for itself in retention and growth. If that’s your strategy, more power to you—unless, this time, you’d care to exercise that bit of prescience we failed to exercise when, to our eventual detriment, we allowed free checking and savings and, later, free online banking to become de rigueur.

Right now, research and experience show the market is amenable to fee-for-mobile. This isn’t the time to wimp out. This is an opportunity, at last, for banks to acclimatize clients to the good-old-fashioned American principle of paying for what you get.

Trouble is, you can bet that not a few financial institutions will give away mobile services, just as they give away everything else. Let’s hope they don’t leave the rest of us little choice but to follow suit. Otherwise, in a few years, we’ll be right back where we are now vis-a-vis other services, saying, “Gee, we’re losing money, but how can we start charging for what we’ve trained the market to expect for free?”

Incidentally, training the market to expect something for free is tantamount to telling them it’s not worth paying for. Don’t think that’s serious? Look what happened to newspapers. Good luck to us all.

Two Observations

I am back from the 7th Annual Mobile Banking and Commerce Summit, where Managing Director of ATH Power Consulting Michael J. McEvoy and I shared the podium to speak on Right Channeling.

Conference presentations were relevant and eye-opening. Perhaps not surprisingly, most focused on transformation, as shown by titles like “Transforming a Web-centric Organization to a Mobile-first Organization” (David Eads), “How Mobile Platforms are Revolutionizing Banking” (Shamir Karkal),  “Embracing Mobile Money” (Steven Lewis), “Seizing the Opportunities in Mobile for Commercial Banking” (Amit Aghara), “Mobile Payments And Commerce—How To Drive Value And Adoption” (Matt Friend, Neil Hickey), and “What Banks Have Learned (or have yet to learn) from Payment Start Ups” (Sean Sposito, Dan Ciporin, Victoria Cheng).

Not that other topics weren’t addressed. There were talks on security and privacy, POS, driving revenue, and maintaining “high touch” in a high tech world. But transition reigned.

All of which leads me to two observations:

1. The emphasis on transition demonstrates that the fast-growing channel in bank history—mobile—has smart bankers scrambling to lead or at least keep up. Good on both. Not so smart, head-in-sand bankers who hope the trend will pass might consider investing some time in updating their resumés. In some other field.

2. Presenters in the banking world need to learn how to write short titles.*

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*While “Delivering a High-Touch, Highly Engaging Mobile Experience: Lessons from the Wealth Management World” and “Deals and Data: Driving Relevant Interactions with Card Members Through Targeted and Mobile Offers” were fine, relevant panel discussions, kudos go to Artie Byrne for his refreshingly succinct “Mobile POS in the Store.”

7 of 44

Bank Innovation just listed me seventh on its list, “2013 Innovators to Watch: 44 Executives Shaping The Future of Banking.”

Even better, you’ll never guess who came in at Number 8. None other than Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Ashton Kutcher. I can’t wait to tell my wife that I eked out a narrow victory over America’s heartthrob. (I’ll let you read for yourself what Kutcher is even doing on a list of banking executives.)

Here is what the kind folks at Bank Innovation had to say:

You might know him as a banker, but do you read Matt Wilcox’s blog, Matt Wilcox Pro? If you don’t, you’re missing out on some insights from a banker in the trenches who is seriously examining how mobile banking is transforming the customer experience. Wilcox’s knowledge is broad and deep — still young, he has 14 years of experience in the industry — and he approaches his work with passion and humor.

Being named to this list is a nice surprise and a huge honor. All kidding aside about coming in ahead of Ashton Kutcher, which, in all seriousness, is no big deal.

(Did I mention that I came in ahead of Ashton Kutcher?)