Quality. The word gets tossed around the business world like a trading card. Almost every brand on the planet wants to be known for quality, but quality is not just a marketing piece. It’s a real, tangible asset to your company’s value. And it’s not something that you can pretend to have: quality is defined by your values, your products and ultimately your customers. That’s why, if you’re a savvy business owner, you’ve already invested in planting signs of quality in everything you do.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

That’s one of our favourite quotes from the venerable Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder. Jobs was a master of quality, a master of marketing and a master of creating signs that pointed to his company’s strengths.

Maybe those signs come in the form of exceptional product packaging, alas Apple, or maybe they come in the form of unequaled customer service, like Amazon; packaging and communication are two of the most obvious ways your customers interact with your company. However, there’s a third no-brainer of customer interaction that too many companies are still missing out on—your website. Websites are a real portal to your products that exist in a surreal digital landscape. But that doesn’t make them any less important. In fact, a website visit is often the first sustained interaction a customer has with a brand. So, you better make sure yours is up to par.

Excellence in website design has not always been synonymous with the internet. In years—decades—past, a company website was an afterthought on a business plan. But here in the mid-2010’s, it’s essential.

Smart businesses start with a web strategy; struggling businesses put web on the back burner, and that’s a shame because every business should be able to reflect quality in a digital customer interaction. Quality is, in many ways, a yardstick, a measuring device, an asset that contains real value.

At Metal Potato, we build quality websites. But beyond that, we try to publish quality blog posts, build high quality online forms (because those are an historically underserved market) and bring high quality customer service to the table each and every day. We’re measuring our business not only by sales figures, but by the satisfaction of our customers and the ease of their new website design projects.

Why? Because we believe in quality, we believe in excellence, and we believe every business has the right to expect both around the clock.