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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

Mary McNeish Stengel is a licensed clinical social worker with over 25 years of experience working with families. In her therapy practice she provides services to children, adolescents and adults for issues that include trauma, abuse, depression, anxiety, parenting, separation and divorce.