Website Design Archives

February 26, 2018 By Jody Raines Leave a Comment

Should You DIY Your Website? Tips For Better User Experience And Design

A friend recently posted on Facebook that her new ‘business website’ has launched. She proudly asked for all of her friends to come and visit and share what they thought. The well-meaning friends who complimented her on the site fueled her enthusiastic response that she created the site herself using a free service. She then offered to ‘create’ websites for her friends who may need a website as well.

While well-intentioned and visible as a website, most small and micro businesses do not realize that there is a mountain of difference between having a website and having an effective website. Even in discussions with clients, I find that many otherwise savvy business people just don’t seem to understand the difference of what constitutes an effective website versus having a brochure online.

If you simply want a place that you can point a prospect to in order to learn about what you do, and you do this by giving them the web address or URL, then by all means, save money and use a free service. For the most part, getting a website as a DIY project will save you money, and possibly time if you are working with an inexperienced or slow web designer. For businesses who have gone the budget website route (like my friend) they have wound up with a site that was poorly thought through, has non indexible content and pages, and cannot be easily updated.

If you are hopeful to develop an effective website, and have prospects find your website online when searching for services you offer, this is not likely to happen with a DIY website.

The difference between a DIY website and one that is professionally produced are manifold. For example, a web designer will help you determine the navigation for your website. This is one of the most critical phases and will determine the “user interface” – in other words, the way that a visitor to your website will navigate to find what they need. A good web design can help the visitor find what they are looking for in the least amount of clicks. Web dev’s understand that too many clicks will result in a lost opportunity, particularly if the individual cannot find the information they are seeking.

Another problem with DIY websites is that they are not created with an eye to optimizing load time and images. Certainly pretty images look great, but if the image file is too large, it will increase load time, and if you’ve ever had to wait for a website to load, you understand that most people won’t! Check your “bounce” rate using Google Analytics and you will see that there are some pages that have high bounce rates. One reason could be that the page takes too long to load… Another reason is that the keywords that brought the reader to that page may be inconsistent with the content the prospect is seeking.

One of the most frequent issues I notice with DIY websites as well as with professionally created websites is the content. I recently visited with a business that supplies software as a service for the mortgage loan industry, and their website suffered from this affliction. Most businesses tend to think of their business in terms of the ptoducts or services they offer. This is in stark contrast with their prospective customer’s motivation; Most customers think of the product or service in terms of how it meets their needs. This is evident in the navigation, the content and will pervasively limite the appeal and results of “SEO” for the website. The problem is manifest in website navigation that is organized in terms that the business thinks makes sense, but is difficult or complex for customers to navigate to find what they want.

A good example that comes to mind is a sign company that I worked with. The owner of ths sign company was frustrated after working with many SEO companies, and spending a lot of money. His website was still buried and not coming up, plus his sales were not coming from the website. We took a look at the site, and the HOME page was so broad and general that it really did not do a good job of presenting anything. We discussed the types of businesses who are most profitable for him, and then reworked the navigation to appeal to the customer’s perspective. Upon re-launch of the site, he saw a huge improvement in inbound leads and business, and was so excited about the transformation of his online business that he became an “inbound marketing consultant” to help others learn what he felt was a winning strategy.

Another example is a small company that manufactures compartmentalized handbags. The bags are geared towards two different markets – they are oversized and help to organize a lot of items, so they are great as a designer diaperbag, and they are also terrific for the working woman executive to carry a notebook or tablet and other office essentials in fashion. The navigation did nothing to help these two audiences find the section that appealed to their needs because the navigation was organized by the colors of the product. Since the product could be used differently regardless of the color, women executives may have been turned off by the diaperbag images, and the mommy buyers could not relate to the business photos. The solution was to create a navigation that would divide the site by customer use and present the appropriate and compelling images and content for those audiences.

If you’ve ever searched for Homemade Dog Food recipes you may have found this next example client. When I first started talking with them, they had a website that was so technical I wasn’t sure what they were trying to sell. It turns out it was a supplement and recipes for a feeding system if you wanted to make homemade dog food. The product makes sense, but if you didn’t know what it was, it would have been difficult to acertain from the picture of a beautiful clean kitchen. The HOME page now features rotating graphics about the benefits of a great home-made diet from healthy glossy coats to renewed activity and vigor and directs prospects to free recipes that all explain the benefits of adding the nutrients in correct proportions…

If you are creating your own website, you may save a few bucks at the outset, but in the long run, if you are serious about your business, you will find that the value of having an inbound marketing professional’s insights can make the difference between having a website and having an effective website.

May 13, 2014 By Jody Raines 2 Comments

Redesigning The Home Page? 8 Common Website Mistakes To Avoid

Redesigning the Website Homepage can result in greatly improved conversions when done well. The first trick is finding a website designer who understands inbound marketing. The process should begin with an evaluation of your existing online marketing campaign as well as your website to ensure that all components work together in an effective and coordinated way.

What, you don’t have an online marketing strategy?

The parts of an online campaign are critical to assuring your ongoing brand development and business success. Not only is your website the foundation, it is also the most important asset because it is the one online asset that you have almost complete control over. Unlike any social networking channel online, the website content is added or changed under your own direction. Other than the search engine, such as Google, introducing new algorithms, your website is the mainstay of your online marketing program. Even with those changes, if you are following Google Best Practices, you will never be hurt by an algorithm change.

What’s wrong with the website?

If you don’t know how your website is performing, you won’t know how to fix it. Without any analytics, you are operating in the dark. Having a track record to improve gives you a benchmark. If you don’t know what is going on with your site, if you have no clue how many visits you have on a monthly, daily, weekly basis, how will you know if your site is performing? One fundamental mistake many web designers make is to look only at the aesthetics of the site without understanding whether it is effective.

If you don’t know anything about the types of visits you have, how many there are, what your bounce rate is or why your visitors are leaving, you should absolutely install tracking to assure that you have this information. Tracking can be done using Google Analytics, which is a wonderful (and free) tool, or can be accomplished by installing one of a number of software solutions including Moz (formerly SEOmoz), Hubspot, Raventools, etc.

Why Change The HOME Page Of Your Website?

The goal of a website redesign should be to improve your conversions. That is the to improve the website in such a way as to appeal more appropriately to the audience who is interested in your services. To do this, you will need to be able to be found, by the right prospects or potential customers for the right reasons.

Improving the design of your HOME page goes beyond the “look and feel” of the website. It’s making the HOME page the doorway to the information that your customers are seeking.

Some companies decide to “redesign due organizational change”. In the case of an aquisition or merger, redesign may be necessary to re-brand the “new” emerging entity. The HUGE mistake that is typically made is to hire a web development company to do a new website, and in the process they are blowing up both the pre-existing sites and starting from scratch. The new site has no authority, no credibility and no inbound links. The old URLs which may have been out there for years are sometimes discarded, and are then available to be picked up by a offshore scavenger who will build a site to take advantage of whatever SEO juice is left, and then re-direct those visitors, potentially to your competition! Why not salvage the domain, the goodwill, the existing “SEO juice”, to redirect to the newly branded website? Apparently there are “web designers” or “website developers” who do not have a clue what destruction they have done by creating the new, beautiful website, and as the business owner, you are relying upon their expertise.

Don’t make these mistakes. Before moving to a new website design, be sure your web developer is following these best practices by avoiding these 8 website design or website redesign mistakes. :

Indexable content. Having a beautiful website with complex graphic design may make the CEO very happy. Unfortunately, many of the beautiful website designs are not created with SEO in mind. If you see pictures that include words, this is not the same as a search engine sees it. In fact, you can read ‘content’ that is a picture. Search engines cannot. I had one client who did not understand why her website was not ranking for her most important keyword until I pointed out to her that most of the instances of her keyword were in a graphic form. Another new client came to me with a recently re-designed website that has zero authority. The company had been around for over ten years, but in creating the new design, the principals had decided to use an acronym as the new URL. Unfortunately, no one realized to redirect the old URL and no mention of the old company name was even on the page! This certainly does not help clients find the website, but also, it just threw away all of the old sites authority. The bottom line, make sure your website is indexible and that your keywords are content, not images.
Keywords. One of the most critical things that I work with for my clients are discovering the best keywords for their product or service. By keywords, it’s important to forgo the jargon and figure out what words your customers and prospects use to find you. Believe it or not, while it’s noble to assume that you can educate an audience to discovering what you mean when you have created or coined a new phrase… you probably do not have enough money in your marketing budget to make that make sense. It makes marketing so much easier and organic to use the phrases your customer’s use to refer to what you do. Also, ask your sales team what is imporatnt to your customers. If you can address what a prospect is searching, you are more likely to show up in that prospect’s search results. Ditch that jargon!
Load time. Beautiful images are nice, but if the file is too large, the site load time is longer. Not only does Google penalize long load times, your customer is unlikely to hang out and wait to see the magnificence that your web designer has created. Nope. In this day and age of instant everything, we (your audience) want to see what we want to see when we want to see it. We are not waiting. If your site takes too long to load because its too graphic heavy, we are on to your competitor’s site. Don’t expect loyalty from a web search.
Clean message. By clean message, what I mean is that your HOME page is not cluttered and confusing. It should be clean. In print advertising we used to refer to the ‘clean’ness as “white space”. There is no need to create multiple images that fight for a viewer’s attention. To the contrary, the site should have a clear idea before its created as to where the viewers eye should travel and what makes sense for that visual message. If your site is too busy and disorganized, you are not sharing a clean message.
Clear message. Now that we have discussed the visual path, let’s make sure that the message that a visitor to our website can absorb. Don’t make the message obtuse or too clever – if you do, your visitor will hop away to the next website just as quickly. I worked with one client who insisted that they wanted their website to look like a whiteboard and they spent a lot of time and money to have the visual elements designed for that theme. What was missing was the message of what they actually do. They are a printing company, and if you dig, you can find that out. Of course, that was a huge challenge to overcome by optimizing the content. The message ideally should be obvious when someone lands on your site as to what you offer and what you do. If it’s not, go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept. Don’t try to be overly cute. It just doesn’t work.
Contact info. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when contact information is buried in a website on the contact page. Sure, it’s a great place to have your contact information, but why not feature a good way to contact you on every page of your website. One of the most effective websites I have worked on has a contact us box on everypage that is coded to indicate what page the lead came from. This website has hundreds of leads on an ongoing basis. Understanding that you should not make someone work through multiple clicks to get in touch is critical to conversions.
Clear Call To Action. So now your website can be discovered, you have a remarkable design that is indexible for the righ keywords, and traffic is through the roof! You are still not done. High traffic to your website does not necessarily correlate into business in your cash register. You must build a clear, call-to-action that suggests what the next steps should be for your prospect.
Branding. Above all, keep in mind that every piece of your marketing campaign including your website should reflect appropriate branding messages. Whether your brand is identifiable by color, font, graphic identity, cutting humor, be sure to be consistent across all platforms, including and especially your website. If you have inconsistent collateral, you are wasting an opportunity to share and reinforce your branding identity. By having all the pieces of the puzzle work in unison, you are reinforcing the message and increasing the potential for your message to be identified easily. Use the same font, logo, colors and messaging across all social media platforms as well as your website, print collateral and any brochures or advertising that you do. Keep the tone of all the collateral consistent as well and your marketing dollars will work harder for you.

What mistakes have you seen in website or homepage redesign? Are you considering a refresh and would like some advise? Give us a call or share your experience…

March 17, 2014 By Jody Raines Leave a Comment

Small Business – Hard Lesson: What You Need To Know About SEO

Your SEO expert may be killing your business. Recently I’ve been receiving calls from friends and potential clients who have been referred to me for help or advice. In most of these cases, I am seeing a similar situation. There is a trend among small businesses to attempt to improve their business by hiring someone who has presented to them a rationale to “improve their SEO”. Most small business owners are adept at understanding their offer and their customer. They are not necessarily website experts, and when presented with a compelling marketing case to improve their website, they feel that they are embracing new technology. Especially if the website has been static for a long time, the buzzwords and inexperience in social media may entice the small business owner to agree to pay an “SEO” to “get me to the top of Google”.

First rule of thumb – anyone who wants your business and who promised to “optimize” to “make you number one on Google” is someone to be wary of. Not because having a high ranking on Google is not a good thing – it is a good thing, generally. What I object to is the charletan who sells a bill of goods about optimizing your website without any regard to who your customer is and how your customer shops, and most importantly, what would be the best type of business for you?

I think it may be clearer if I share some examples. Recently I was approached by a company that offers office furniture for business. The gentleman who owns the company was concerned because he recently spent “a ton of money” with an SEO company to optimize his website. His concern stems from the fact that before the optimization, he would recieve phone calls. Now, his phone does not ring at all.

Whether the website is coming up at the “top” of a search is irrelevant if it does not result in improved business.

The gentleman learned a lesson the hard way. The first mistake that was made was when the SEO (and I use that term loosely) told him that he had to completely re-do the website.

Second rule of thumb – if anyone comes in and tells you that they have to completely re-do your website, ask them why? What are they seeing that makes it important to rip apart what is there to create something new? If the website was built in an old technology, or had un-indexible content, that is a valid reason to re-do the website. However, care should be taken to preserve the SEO or any inbound links or references to the URLs of the existing site. If the web designer does not give a clear reason, then beware! Unfortunately, sometimes a web designer wants to re-design a website simply to bump up the amount that you will wind up paying over time.

Another reason you may wind up creating a new website is that you were with a service and no longer want to utilize the service. Some franchised web companies will get business by suggesting that they specialize in a specific business market, for example, there is one that I can think of that supposedly specialized in day spas. Another that I can think of specialized in real estate. A third ostensibly is expert with legal websites. Is there an advantage of going with an organization that has done a done of websites in your industry? Yes and no. The advantage is that they probably have done some research and know what keywords to pursue. The disadvantage is that they have done some research and know what keywords to pursue – and they have done the same research and keywords for every other client in the same industry. So, your website will not be unique, your keywords will be the same as everyone else’s, and you will wind up with a formula site and a high probability of being penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.

One scam I saw recently was a human resources firm that hired a company to “optimize” their website. The optimization agency only charges if they obtain first place ranking on Google for keywords that the client suggests. It’s not hard to see what could potentially be wrong with this picture. I happend to have visibility into the analytics, and sure enough, there was a ton of traffic when the agency started up. Ironically none of the traffic was from the trade area that the hr company draws from. Will they be paying for this optimization, you bet! But the price will not only be paying for placement, it will also be in lost business from true prospects who may find the company through organic search.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it’s that there are no shortcuts. Or perhaps, there are shortcuts if you know the right way, and they consist of doing the right steps, and not trying to ‘scam’ the system. Now that Hummingbird and symantic search have become the norm, it’s not as easly to stuff an article with keywords, or to pay for backlinks to your articles. That can and will be used against you. Instead, the important steps to creating a well rounded, content rich website remain doing things the right way.

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