Category Archives: Website

Website design and production, website management

Is Your Website Marketing You Well?

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In today’s world of savvy technology-driven customers, your Website is your No. 1 business calling card. Is your company’s Website positioned to do that? Is it marketing you well? Is it helping you meet your sales goals?

Any marketing investment must be focused on realistic goals and mechanisms for achieving them. No matter what method or application you deploy, first and foremost, focus on your Website. Your Website belongs at the center of your marketing strategy and connecting with customers, an activity that’s the core of every marketing effort.

Think of your Website as an investment in brand marketing, creating awareness in the minds of your stakeholders. If you develop a plan with your customers in mind, you will get a return on your investment. To do that, you need to know your strategy, create good content, and have simple, obvious and intuitive navigation.

Four-Steps to Consider

A customer-centric Website should follow a four-step development plan, which includes your assessing and clearly understanding your brand strategy, customers, objectives and marketing goals.

Website Brand Strategies

The most successful brand strategies take advantage of the Web, using a well-designed and carefully planned identity that has clear, precise messages (content) that fulfill user experiences.

You need to know and understand your brand. What makes your company and its products or services compelling, attractive and unique against your competitors. This requires that you honestly evaluate what your brand value is to your customers and other important stakeholders.

What do you want your site do? Provide Information, lead generation or sales. Or, a combination of these. You need to know your site’s purpose in order to structure it. If you haven’t answered all of the above questions, your strategy won’t be on target and you’re unlikely to succeed with your Website.

Website Customer Relationships

You’ve identified your customers’ needs, but what is your company’s image and reputation among important stakeholders?  Can these strengths be leveraged, and how? What do you want to accomplish with your customer relationships? Do you want to change them?

Website Objectives

Other considerations include the organization of your Website. It should be organized so that it will be easy for your customers to accomplish their goals. Don’t confuse them by organizing it by what you’d like.

Look at your Website just like you would your office building, and that includes your location, front entrance and interior. To ensure you reach your customers, you need a Website that has curb appeal and is easy to navigate. Maximize your layout. Customers only give you a few seconds to find what they want or they’ll leave and never return.

What about the copy? Your Website should be loaded with good searchable content, and powerful words that convince your potential customers to keep reading and to help eventually gain their trust. Features don’t sell, benefits do. Solve your customers’ dilemmas. Address their problems, interests, values and how they want to receive service. And, don’t forget a call to action to get your customers to contact you. A call to action statement is needed to help motivate a customer to buy your product or service.

Also, be smart about your Website design. Consider the pros and cons of elements that represent a design aesthetic that is not needed and simply annoys your customers. And even worse, using these features makes it harder for search engines to index your site.

Other questions to consider include: where will the site be hosted? Any technology limitations? How many pages? What types of content, charts and photography do you want to use? Do you need any contact, request information or quote forms? Who will update the site in the future? Does the site need a content management system so an administrator can update it easily? Or, do you have a tech-savvy programmer? Who will write the copy? Are you linked to your social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?

Website Marketing

Having a great Website is a job half done. To complete the other half, you must drive traffic to your site. Fill your site with good search engine optimization (SEO) to get your site found. SEO done well will boost your Website traffic and help create a lead-capturing mechanism, and keep you ahead of your competitors.

Rather than only driving traffic to your Website, concentrate on getting motivated prospects and valuable customers to visit your Website. A few well-thought out key words and phrases that differentiate your core messages will increase valuable clicks and conversions. It’s much better to attract fewer visitors with precise words, who will convert to a sale, than thousands of random, web-surfing visitors.

And, remember that your Website can get old quickly. You must update your content frequently. Take down old products and services, keep press releases current, and provide relevant and updated information.

Launching a Website can be a real challenge. The key to developing a winning Website is to clearly identify your goals, know what you want to accomplish and work with a Website firm that understands both the front end (what people see – the design and content) and the back end (what makes it work – building and development).

Effective, Ongoing Public Relations

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Good public relations (PR) is a carefully planned, sustained effort to establish a corporate identity, maintain credibility and promote communication between an organization and its public. In other words, it’s keeping your name and good deeds out in front of the public.

Many people think press release when thinking about PR. Press releases are good and do have their place, but one of the major functions of PR is media relations. This is maintenance of an ongoing relationship with the media. Developing an ongoing relationship with media in your industry will encourage a reporter to get in touch via phone or e-mail with the spokesperson for your company, when stories are written about your industry. It includes being mentioned and quoted in stories related to your industry, placing stories exclusively about your company and obtaining speaking engagements for appropriate people within the organization. Third party endorsement by the media sells integrity, quality and extraordinary service like no advertisement can.

Public relations is an ongoing, proactive process and hard work. It means getting the word of the positive, newsworthy item that happens at your business to the media so that they, in turn, will tell the story to their audiences — your potential customers. When this happens successfully, the end result is publicity.

Good publicity is any news that is of potential interest to the people in your community or industry. People make news. Employee promotions and awards make news. Events make news — business opening, special promotions, anniversary celebrations, participation in or sponsorship of a community event. Innovations are news — a new product, a new service.

The more your customers read, see and hear about your company’s accomplishments, achievements and activities, the greater the awareness of you and your business in the local community and industry, and a better image will result.

Awareness and a good image are what can set your company ahead of its competitors.

When someone makes a claim, you typically say, “How do you know?” The reply you most likely will hear is “I read it” not I heard it in a commercial. PR has the power to persuade the public.

Why should you care about Website usability?

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Website UsabilityBecause your potential customers may leave if you don’t.

A great Website starts with great content. However, even the best content may not attract or keep your customers’ interest if your Website lacks usability.

According to the W3C, the worldwide organization that writes Website standards, “usability is about designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying.”

For Websites, usability improves the user experience – making information easier to find and understand, resulting in more leads and / or sales.

Why should you care? In a nutshell, because people will leave your Website if is difficult to use. If it doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll leave. If your products are difficult to find, they won’t buy them. And, if your phone number is not prominent, they won’t call.

Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or a service, making your site usable is a key element in ensuring you have satisfied prospects and customers.

How can you make your Website more usable?

Design with consistency – A consistent header throughout your site, with prominent logo, company name, phone number, and contact link will make it easy for your prospective customers to understand who you are and how to contact you. In addition, a common main navigation, three clicks or less deep, will make all the pages of your site easy to find.

Be simple and skimmable – Web users skim pages when looking for information, products and services. Given that you have very few seconds to capture a user’s attention, it is essential that users are able to skim your pages for important information, and that the information is presented in simple and direct language. Keep industry jargon to a minimum and write in easy-to-understand sentences so that everyone, regardless of educational level, can understand your meaning. Break up long pages with headings and subheadings and pull out important information into easy-to-read bullet points.

Proofread for errors and meaning – A site riddled with misspelled words and grammatical errors is difficult to read and understand. Proofreading is an essential last step when writing. It gives you the opportunity to find not only your errors, but also to ensure that your text is conveying the meaning you have intended.

Put your important content first – Studies show that Web users view pages starting from the top left to top right, then the middle followed by the left side and finally the bottom. This may seem obvious to point out, but put your most important information in the most viewed areas of the page. That way, people who are skimming pages will see your most important information first, before possibly losing interest.

White space is a good thing – White space, or negative space, is the space between elements. Oftentimes people mistake white space as ‘empty,’ or space that needs to be filled up. However, white space fills a very important role – it allows the eye to distinguish between items and dramatically affects readability. It helps items stand out and separates them from other elements. Ultimately, white space can help improve readability while the lack of white space can destroy the readability of your Web page. If you have a lot of content, be sure to increase the amount of white space to make it easier to read.

Use proper HTML tags – The use of proper HTML tags, or semantic coding, is very important to usability for the visually impaired. Visually impaired people often rely on screen readers to read pages back to them. These types of programs cannot interpret pages well unless they are clearly explained in the HTML code.

Even if you do not know any HTML, it is possible to ensure that your Web pages are using the proper HTML tags. Modern content management systems will use the proper HTML tags if you make the right choices when designing your pages. Use the following as a guide:

  • The headline of your page should always be ‘heading 1’
  • Subheads should be ‘heading 2’ through ‘heading 6’ in order of importance
  • The bold button should be used to highlight important words within the body of your article (not article headings or subheads)
  • The italic button should be used for text that needs emphasis, like the names of publications
  • Use the blockquote button instead of multiple spaces to indent text
  • Use the enter key to begin a new paragraph and shift-enter to add a soft return, or line break
  • Only use underlines to denote hyperlinks – most content management systems will do this for you automatically

Test your pages – Always, always test your pages in multiple browsers to ensure your page layouts look as intended. Each browser has its own unique quirks and what looks good in one may look completely unreadable in another. We recommend testing in Internet Explorer 7, 8, and 9, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari.

Likeability – All things being equal, users will follow up with, and purchase from, the site they ‘like’ the best. This is where the importance of branding comes into play… but, that is another article. ;-)