Blog

Amateur Website = Less Business

August 16th, 2010 | Posted in Blog, design | Comments Off

It wasn’t all that long ago that conducting business via the internet was a bit of a novelty. Most people probably vaguely recall making their first purchase online, or ordering and sending a gift to a friend using the tools provided by a website. That novelty has faded over time however, and what once a curiosity is now a necessity for most modern businesses.

I can’t help but notice the increasing role that the look and feel of a website plays in the arc of a business transaction. Lately I have worked on several projects where my client already had a web presence, but felt that it was too amateurish and was hurting their business by delivering a poor first impression.

This is becoming more common–business owners not content to simply have a website, but desiring something that conveys an air of expertise. There is a good reason for this: If you look like an amateur online, people will be less inclined to do business with you. I don’t have any studies handy to back up this assertion (although I am sure some exist). Rather I look to my own experiences.

Finding A Business Online

I make my living on the web, but I also use it in my personal life just like everyone else. More than a few times in the past year or so I have needed to make a purchase or pay someone for their services. Here are the steps we’ve become hardwired to follow:

  • Type Search Term Into A Search Engine Such As Google, Yahoo, Or Bing.
  • Scan The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) For Links Relevant To Our Search
  • Start Clicking On Sites And Sizing Them Up.

This last part is where I see a lot of small business owners drop the ball. Getting people to your site is completely different from presenting your online business in the most efficient, user-friendly way possible. You can spend a lot of time and money getting your site to return as the top search result for keyword “xyz”. But if people feel an overwhelming urge to get away as quickly as possible after clicking on the link, you have failed to close the deal.

I can’t tell you how many times I have done a search and pulled up a list of local businesses only to click through and marvel at how amateurish most of them look. Many times I have decided to give my business to a company solely based on the look and feel of the website. In the real world looks and first impressions are a very important part of making an impressions–both for people and for businesses.

Just as you would never dream of meeting with a client in sweatpants and a dirty T-shirt, you should not present yourself online with a site that looks like it was built by your 6-year-old nephew. As I like to say: A good website is an investment that pays for itself.

Getting People To Your Site, Pt. 1: Identifying Your Target Audience

July 21st, 2010 | Posted in Blog, marketing | Comments Off

OK, so you have a website you are happy with. Now what?? Building a website is one thing, getting people to visit it–and want to return–is entirely another.

First a qualifier: This post, like most of the material on this site, is intended for the small-medium business owner. IBM goes about targeting its audience in a very different way than Sally’s Hats does. That said, the thing all businesses have in common is that they are selling something–a product or service. Who are they selling to??

All businesses should start their marketing plan with a target audience in mind. Getting the word out about your business isn’t tremendously difficult on the web. It’s getting it to the right people–the people you want to visit your site and purchase your services–that is tricky.

Visits to a website are measured as traffic. Google breaks traffic sources down into three groups based on origin: Referring Sites, Direct Traffic, and Search Engines. Let’s look at each.

Direct Traffic: These are visitors who came to your site without first visiting a search engine, another site, or some marketing tactic. So to use the example from above, my wife goes to Sally’s Hats in their storefront down on Main Street. As she is paying the clerk tells her that they have an email newsletter that keeps loyal customers in the loop about upcoming sales & events, and all she needs to do is visit SallysHats.com and sign up. My wife returns home and types SallysHats.com in her browser without searching or being referred there by a link on another site. This is direct traffic.

Referring Sites: The definition of a referring site is any website (blog, forum, affiliate, etc.) that sends visitors to your website. To be more specific, it is any link that points back to your website. There are of couse, many ways nowadays to get links to your site out on the internet: blog & forum posts, banner ads, newsletters, link exchanges, directories, social media (such as Twitter and Facebook). Any time someone sees a link and clicks on it and is taken to your website, this is said to be traffic originating from a referring site.

Search Engines: This group is pretty self-explanatory. Any time someone types a keyword or sequence of keywords into a search engine (let’s say “custom ladies hats”) and clicks on one of the links that apppear on the search engine results page (SERP), this traffic is counted as originating from search engines. As of the end of September 2009 these were the top search engines (according to Hitwise), with their share of the market in parenthesis:

Google (70.46)
Yahoo (16.73)
Bing (9.28)
Ask (2.50)

While there are other search engines, these four currently cover 98% of the US market, so it is a sound strategy to focus on just these industry leaders.

Now that you understand how traffic arrives at your website, the focus should be on the type of traffic–reaching that target audience. The first thing a business should do when planning a marketing campaign is identifying their target audience. Going back to Sally and her hats, let’s look at two scenarios. In the first as a result of some online marketing Sally has managed to drive 100 unique visitors to her website every day in a given week. However, these visitors are primarily young male gun enthusiasts. In the other scenario she uses more a more targeted campaign to drive 25 visitors per day, and these visitors are primarily older females with generous amount of disposable income.

Looking at it from a purely numbers standpoint is misleading. What website owner wouldn’t want to boast about increasing their traffic 400%. But remember, success for an online business is measured in conversions–the number of people who take your site’s desired action–not raw traffic (unless getting the most eyeballs on the pages is your desired action). It’s a good bet that Sally will get more conversions–in this case, sell more hats–from the second scenario, since this is her target audience.

Once you have identified your target audience the next steps should be finding them online and effectively marketing to them. I will cover these steps in a future post.

Social Media And Conversions

June 5th, 2010 | Posted in Blog, marketing | Comments Off

I was initially planning to write about the wonderful world of social media and business. How it’s a game-changer and all you need to do nowadays is sign up for a Twitter or Facebook account and watch the users come streaming in. But the truth of the matter is twofold: 1) There are officially enough of these types of articles pumped out on a daily basis that no one need ever write about it again, and 2) it’s more than a bit misleading.

You see I drank the Kool-Aid and signed up for the popular social networks expecting it to be easy to connect with lots of people in a short amount of time and promote my business. And for the most part it was. It didn’t take me long at all to get lots of new “friends”. But once I started marketing my services in earnest the realization came that there is a real difference between an audience of random users and a pool of users in a targeted demographic.

And there’s the rub. Maybe you can believe the hype–a large plugged-in audience for your products or services is only a few clicks away. But are they the right audience for you? And what are you going to do with them once you successfully drive them to your site? In other words, you can use social networks and marketing to drive a thousand unique visitors a day to your website, but if you can’t convert any of those visits–if none of those visitors responds to your call to action–all of that effort is wasted.

It would be better to spend the time to develop a targeted audience made up of users who are likely to be interested in your business. If you drive five of those select users to your site and two of them respond to your call to action, that’s a 40% conversion rate. So in the end the time spent to drive those five users is much more valuable than the time spent to get a thousand with no conversions.

It is a good bit more work going out and finding the right audience for you versus getting any warm body you come across on-board. But in the end, where it matters most, you will be rewarded for the extra time and effort.

The Battle Of The Browsers

May 14th, 2010 | Posted in Blog, misc | Comments Off

I have a confession to make: I’ve been cheating for a few weeks now. Running around with a new steady. I’ve given my regular partner the cold shoulder and let that new relationship excitement wash over me.

What am I talking about? Why my browser, of course. One cannot understate the importance of the relationship between a web professional and their browser. It is our lifeline to everything; the interface to our world.

Thus it was with no small amount of guilt that I made the switch. You see I have been a loyal and happy user of Mozilla’s Firefox browser for many years now. The first thing I did every morning after firing up my machine was to click on the little orange and blue logo. But after many happy browsing sessions some trouble crept into paradise. It started with the add-ons–those little function plug-ins that have made Firefox so popular. I started reading articles about all the “must have” add-ons and how they would make my life and my work easier. And a lot of them did. But they slowed me down too.

I have a good 8 or 10 applications open on my laptop at any given moment. That is just the nature of the beast for me. I routinely bounce between tasks: coding, designing, illustrating. And some of these applications are well-known resource hogs (I’m looking at you, Photoshop). Suddenly my once-lite and speedy browser was a bloated hog competing for scarce memory.

Any good web designer worth his or her salt will have all the latest web browsers close at hand, for cross browser testing. So I decided to audition them to see which would become my “browsing browser”. Google’s Chrome was my initial choice since I had read nothing but good things about its speed and simplicity. Well so far, so good. I can vouch for the speed claims, and Chrome has replaced Firefox as part of my startup routine.

And don’t feel too bad for the jilted Firefox. It is now my specialty browser. Whenever I need to examine CSS or a page element or grab some video, I call on my old familiar friend. As web users create more accounts & logins with more passwords and preferences, will we see compartmentalized browsers? Flock for social networking, Firefox for development, and IE for making you cry out with rage? Has that day already arrived and am I just late to the party?

Information Overload

April 12th, 2010 | Posted in Blog, misc | Comments Off

I’ve often heard it said that technology has irreversibly changed our lives. There can be no doubt that some of the technological innovations of the past 20 years or so have altered the way the average person approaches their day. But are we better off for it? I mean do Facebook, Twitter, and BlackBerries enhance our lives and make us more productive workers, or do they have the opposite effect? Are they in fact just adding lots of digital clutter to our already chaotic lives?

I don’t pretend to have the answer to this question. For certain, there have been large-scale studies performed on just this topic, and a quick Google search will likely bring you enough information to form your own opinion. But what about a small-scale example? What about a day in the life of one man–a web worker?

Web design, like many other technology related fields, requires those who make their living in it to stay on top of its ever-evolving nature. The role of technology in the life of a web worker is paramount. Whereas keeping abreast of the latest releases when it comes to consumer electronics products like iPods or netbooks is one thing, following trends of social networking and productivity tools is something else entirely. In my chosen profession we are, by definition, what we know. A potential client wants to know if I have experience with social media, can I build for all the latest browser versions, will I be able to add the newest features to their website. Technology has become so all pervasive that it is not only the professional who relies on it daily, but also the public at large.

The challenge becomes not in the finding of information, but in the sound consumption. Because each of us has only a finite number of hours each day to work and build our skills, identifying valid and beneficial flows of data amongst the incoming tidal waves becomes critical. It is all too easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of information sent your way on a daily, or even hourly, basis. Between Twitter, RSS feeds, and blogs alone I get literally hundreds of items competing for my eyeballs every day.

For me the solution lies in the saying “less is more”. My goal is to pick out a few gems, those resources that bring genuine value to my work day, and set those to the side. I try to set goals for myself–skills I am trying to improve or technologies I am trying to learn more about. If an item, an article or feed, doesn’t help me in any tangible way, I do away with it. There is simply not enough time in one day to engage everything that catches our eye, and as the wave of information grows, sorting the treasures from the trash becomes an invaluable skill itself.

Today’s Search Engine Optimization, Part 1

December 20th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, seo | Comments Off

In an earlier post I discussed how the business of building websites has changed over the years. Believe it or not, there was a time when it was enough to put up a few pages, do your best to get the word out, and hope for the best. As business on the web has exploded, the whole process has gotten more sophisticated and grown exponentially more complex.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have removed any barriers to making great looking sites on the web. The only thing holding you back now is your level of creativity. Usability has gone from being an obscure concept to a vital component of any successful website. What can be more important than ensuring that you are able to close the deal by giving your users exactly what they want–quickly and easily?

Search Engine Optimization has changed dramatically from the early days of the web as well. For the uninitiated, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) via search results. SEO is done “organically” by controlling certain tags and aspects of a site’s architecture. Because some of these “under the hood” aspects of a website can be the difference between a few sales an a lot of sales, site owners should be aware of their importance.

I titled this post “Today’s Search Engine Optimization” because things have changed so much from just a few years ago. There was a time when meta data and keywords were very important in returning a website a high ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs. Unfortunately it was effective to spam tags with keywords that had nothing to do with the actual content of the site, and this lead to widespread abuses. Keywords and meta data have been rendered all but valueless nowadays.

When the shift in the way search engines ranked sites came, something needed to fill the void left by the exit of keywords and meta data. A new mantra came to describe how to optimize your site: Content is King.

In Part 2 of this post I will look at ways to optimize the content on your site, and what tags behind the scenes catch the eye of those all powerful search engines.

Inspiration

November 11th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, design | Comments Off

Lately I have found myself wearing my designer hat again after slipping out of it for a while to work with some PHP. Creativity is a fickle thing. It comes and goes when it feels like it, without any regard for you and your deadlines. So how does a modern designer take back some control and attempt to harness the creative instinct?

Fortunately there is no shortage of resources promising quick and easy inspiration. Every day (every hour?) I get Twitter and RSS feed updates saying things like, “50 Websites to Inpsire You” or “200 Photos to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing”. But do these resources really inspire, or are they just more digital clutter like I talked about in my last post?

In my business, it has been important to me to establish a workflow. Having standard practices brings order to an often chaotic process. But how exactly do you standardize inspiration and the creative process? That initial phase of website building follows no rules, and that can be both a blessing and a curse.

Fortunately for me I have been through the process enough times to have a rough guide of my own at this point. I start by listing out the known factors. What type of business is it? A wine bar will require a very different website from a law firm. What are they selling? What is the call-to-action on the page going to be? From there I start to sketch out a rough draft on paper. I find that listing out the elements of the site helps me a great deal.

I have a number of CSS galleries bookmarked in my Delicious account, and I make sure to visit them and check out the latest designs. CSS has developed to the point where it really allows for near limitless possibilites when it comes to putting creative ideas on the page. There are many top designers practicing today who regularly post their work to provide inspiration to the masses. While I go out of my way to not rip-off their ideas, more than once I have seen page elements positioned or images and color schemes used in ways that I had never thought of. This is where the inspiration comes in. I will return to my own design, which by now has made its way into Photoshop and try out some of the ideas while they are still fresh in my head. Back to the galleries–rinse and repeat.

It really is a fine line between wanting to use the newest coolest tricks in your work and keeping focused on delivering what the client needs. And if you can do both, even better.

Content Management Systems

October 7th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, cms | Comments Off

A Content Management System, or CMS, is an application used to create and maintain web content. This content can include HTML pages, images, and video. The difference between a website builder like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver and a CMS is that a CMS is set up to allow users with no knowledge of programming or markup languages to produce and manage content with relative ease. A user is set up and administers the site through a web-based interface that looks very much like what one might find with popular office productivity tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

While there are many commercial options that cater to larger corporate clients, the past few years has seen a boom in the number of free open-source Content Management Systems that appeal to smaller businesses or individuals. One of the benefits to using an open-source CMS, besides the cost, is that most of the popular ones have large user communities who regularly develop new features and help troubleshoot any problems.

I started working with Mambo and WordPress years ago and saw the benefits of using a CMS almost immediately. Here was a set of standards and templates brought into the chaotic world of site design. And a CMS allows multiple users to own and edit their content, which is ideal in a larger office with different departments. Along the way I worked with several other Content Management Systems, such as Joomla, Drupal, and ExpressionEngine.

These are all open source, and obviously much more information can be found at their respective sites. But here is a small summary of each:

Mambo

One of the elder statesman of the open-source CMS group, Mambo is an award-winning application that is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL to store data. Mambo has been around since 2001 and over 7 million people have downloaded it in that time. Ease of installation, a user-freindly interface, and great flexibility are some of Mambo’s selling points. Being a more established Content Management System also means that the Mambo support community is more experienced, which is a big plus.

Joomla

Joomla first came into being in 2005 as an offshoot of Mambo. Since then the two systems have gone their separate ways, and Joomla has done a lot to become well established and very highly regarded in its own right. Joomla has a large user community with the official forum reporting over 250,000 members. The core application allows for modular extension and integrations to be made easily. This has lead to the development of what are called Plugins, which are extensions to the Joomla CMs that enhance its functionality. Some examples include message boards, image slideshows, and shopping carts. Users can “plug in” these modules to the Joomla CMS without having a lot of technical know-how. There are currently over 4,000 Plugins available for Joomla.

Drupal

Another older, more well established CMS is Drupal. It has been around almost as long as Mambo, and has recently seen its popularity increase greatly. Like the others, Drupal was designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added with relative ease. Drupal boasts many well-known brand names and not-for-profit organizations who now use it to manage their web content.

ExpressionEngine

This is a newer CMS that is gaining in popularity. It is available in a free “Core Version”, and in both “Personal” and “Commercial” versions after paying a one-time fee. ExpressionEngine is intended to be simpler to use than other Content Management Systems; for example, it requires no knowledge of PHP, and has extensive online documentation.

WordPress

Perhaps best known as a blog publishing application, WordPress also functions as a suprisingly rich CMS. WordPress uses a templating system, which includes Widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced site customizations.

Renaissance Man

September 12th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, misc | Comments Off

I have been working on websites professionally for over a dozen years. I started my career in New York City at a downtown publishing house. As the web started to take off, my company decided to launch an online version of their most popular publication for subscribers. I was put in charge of making sure the data transfer process went smoothly.

My experience qualified me to be in charge of the company intranet, where I first honed my HTML expertise. Over the next few years my skill set grew along with the emergence of the web. I worked in design, development, advertising, production, marketing, social media, and every other area of running a successful website.

One day I found myself in a position where I was sitting in meetings all day and talking about websites instead of building them. I was unhappy and knew that I missed getting my hands dirty and the satisfaction that comes with creating something successful. It was then that I decided to start my own web business.

The original idea was to specialize in a few areas. But as I started to work with clients the plan soon evolved out of necessity. You see, more often than not it doesn’t cut it any more to simply throw up a few static HTML pages and hope people come and visit them. You have to approach a website with a vision for not only building, but also marketing and expanding.

Fortunately having a wide range of experience allows SeventyTwelve Web Solutions to offer an extensive list of services to our clientele. We offer design, development, CMS, copy writing, hosting & email, marketing, social media, SEO, and advertising services. I originally intended to name this post “Jack of All Trades,” but was put off by the somewhat negative connotation that term carried. Instead I went with “Renaissance Man” since it means a person who excels in multiple fields. So as the web evolves and demands more multidirectional thinking, the Renaissance Man leads the way.

I can only hope there is a Mona Lisa inside waiting to get out.