Website Design Solutions and Considerations
December 5, 2008 by Melissa Donovan · 4 Comments
In the world of website management, it’s often been said that content is king, but if your design fails, nobody will stick around long enough to experience the content.
Some consider design to be a component of content, but it’s actually a separate consideration having to do more with aesthetics and branding than actual content, which is the information, images, and products or services that a site presents to its audience.
When you’re getting ready to launch or redesign your site, take your time, develop the content first, and seek out comprehensive, proven website design solutions to ensure that your site’s design is a success.
Let’s look at some basic considerations to keep in mind when you’re getting ready to design your website.
Content Development
Most web professionals agree that a site’s content should drive the design and not the other way around. Before you get started with design, develop a comprehensive content plan. Here are some questions to consider during the content development phase:
- Do you already have a logo? If not, you might want to get one before you start on your website design.
- What will be on your home page? Will it be image-driven or text-driven? The most effective home pages serve as an introduction to a site’s content.
- How many pages will the site have? Try to include the basics: home, about, contact, FAQ, and at least one page that describes your products or services.
- Will the site include a blog? Articles? Videos?
- How often will the site be updated or changed? Keep in mind that if you don’t make your own updates, you’ll have to pay someone every time a small change is made. Also, remember that the more frequently you update your site, the better your search engine rank will be.
Image and Branding
Your site should reflect your company image. Are you sleek and professional? Warm and friendly? Cutting edge? Your image is an essential part of your brand, and it should be reflected in everything that relates to your website and your company – from press releases to advertisements.
One of the most essential branding components is your logo. If you don’t have one, your website designer may be able to create one for you as part of your design package. Your logo should appear on your business card, website, in ads, and all other materials that you share, publish, or distribute.
If you start with a logo and company image, you’ll already have the foundations in place for your website. Design solutions come quickly and easily when a well-planned brand is already in place.
Traffic Generation
Before you design and launch your site, you should spend some time thinking about how you’ll draw traffic. Some websites draw all their traffic from search engines. If you plan on harnessing search engine traffic, you’ll want to optimize your site and that would be mean hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) expert. Website copywriting professionals (like me) often offer a variety of SEO services, including SEO copywriting.
You may also use directory listings, referrals, and advertisements. Your website copywriter can help with writing text ads and your website designer should be able to create image ads for you. Remember that any text or image ads that you use to promote your site should tie in with your brand and your design scheme.
If you have a handle on how you’ll draw traffic before you start working on the design, you can incorporate your ads or SEO into the content development and design plan. For example, if your online marketing plan includes a press release, article marketing, or newsletter, your website copywriter can work on these while writing your website copy. Everything will be coherent, written in the same tone, and it will all reflect your image and brand.
Finally, Bring in the Designer
First and foremost you need to figure out who is going to be generating your web site. Here are a few options:
- Design it yourself – If you already know web design, this is an obvious choice.
- Use WYSIWYG web design software – For the record, WYSIWYG stands for What You See is What You Get. This would include software such as FrontPage, which is relatively easy to use, especially for anyone familiar with the Microsoft Office suite of products.
- Use an automated site generator – Hosts such as Yahoo! provide automated tools, which are user friendly and walk you through the process of putting together a web page.
- Hire someone – You can hire a business or an independent professional (freelance web designer) to put your site together.
- Trade – If you can find a web designer who is in need of the products or services you offer, you can inquire about doing a trade.
- Get someone to do it for free – If you know someone who’s willing and able, ask away!
No matter who designs your site, you should take a look at some of their previous work to make sure that their style and skill level matches your design needs. You also need to understand that there’s more to design than the way a site looks. If your site will include e-commerce, for example, you may need a design team that includes a designer and a web programmer.
Before the site is built, you need to consider what you want it to look like. If you hire someone, they will ask you to outline your preferences in terms of color and layout, and they’ll need to know whether you have any images or links you want to display on the site. Be prepared to have a preliminary design plan.
In these times, a well-built website is critical to business success. Whether you’re starting a brand new site or revamping an existing one, don’t rush. Take the time to plan carefully so you save time and money later and get it done right the first time.
Track and Improve Your Website Performance
December 3, 2008 by Melissa Donovan · 5 Comments
For a website to succeed, it has to attract visitors and convert them into customers. Your traffic statistics can provide helpful insight about your website’s visitors. How many people visit your site? Do they stick around or click away, right away? Is your website design inviting? Is the content sticky?
A traffic report and analysis uses measurable results to analyze your website’s performance. Traffic statistics are a valuable resource for determining a website’s overall performance and for making decisions about how to update and maintain the site. But those same statistics are meaningless unless they are correctly interpreted.
Once you understand how your site is performing, the next step is to understand why. Can traffic be increased? Is there a way to get visitors to stay on the site for longer periods? A website review examines your site’s design and content and provides suggestions and recommendations for improvements and expansion, plus tips to grow traffic and ultimately gain more customers.
Scribizzy offers a number of services in tracking, analyzing, and reviewing your website’s performance. We can interpret your traffic statistics, offer expert advice for how to use your statistics to improve your website’s performance, and can offer a comprehensive review of your site’s content and design.
Interested in improving your website’s performance? Visit our Reviews and Reports page to learn more.
Building Brand Recognition with Online Marketing Strategies
December 2, 2008 by Melissa Donovan · Leave a Comment
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Branding and marketing professionals understand the power of image. Think about the Apple logo, the Nike swoosh, and Starbuck’s emblem. These symbols are burned into our minds and they immediately trigger brand recognition as well as the feelings and attitudes we hold individually or collectively toward the companies and products that they represent.
We’re used to seeing logos and image-based branding on business cards, television and print ads, and product packaging. However, there is no medium more powerful for propelling brand recognition than the internet.
In today’s technology-driven world, online marketing strategies are the foremost method for promoting your company’s brand. That means building brand recognition by depicting your logo and maintaining a consistent image along with a clear message.
The core of your image is your company’s logo. The first and most obvious placement for this image is on your website. Next, create an email signature that includes your business’s logo. What comes after that?
As you travel the information superhighway as a representative of your business, whether it’s a one-person entrepreneurship or a vast enterprise, there are countless opportunities for displaying an image – that key symbol that identifies your brand. And the more you display that image, the more familiar and recognizable it will become to your associates, competitors, and customers.
Social Media Outreach
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace provide ample opportunities for logo display and online marketing strategies. Some social media experts make a living using these platforms to promote businesses on the web. Many small business owners and independent professionals sign up for these social media networks but forget to harness the outreach they provide. Embed your brand into your Twitter background (don’t forget to include your website address). Use your logo as your Facebook picture. List your site on your LinkedIn profile.
Two Ways to Build Your Brand on Blogs
There are two ways to build your brand on blogs. First, launch your own blog and incorporate your company image in posts, images, feed footers, or email subscriptions. Be careful not to overdo it, though. Next, use your image when you visit other blogs. You can do this easily by using Gravatar, which automatically inserts your image beside comments you leave on other blogs.
Promote Yourself in Forums
Forums are an ideal way to connect with others in your industry, including prospective customers. This is a more subtle form of online marketing, but through connections, you can develop a functional network that will lead to more business. Most forums allow users to to create a signature, and many, like blogs, use avatars, images associated with your profile that appear alongside each message you post.
Commit to Online Marketing Strategies
The key to building brand recognition lies in identifying opportunities as they arise and then seizing them. Keep a copy of your logo handy and use it in situations where you are asked to upload and display images online. Always insert your company name, tagline (or slogan), and website address (URL) in signatures and profiles that you use around the internet. That way, you’ll be able to propel your online marketing strategies at a moment’s notice.
Tip: Try creating a folder with all the information (don’t forget your elevator pitch and company bio) and storing it on your desktop for easy access! Be prepared at all times, and keep copies of your logo in traveling media like a memory key or stored in your inbox, so you can access and use it anytime, from anywhere.
Start finding those opportunities now by looking for innovative places on the web where you can display your brand. Go through all your online profiles and cyber haunts and make sure you’re promoting your business appropriately!
How do you incorporate your business brand to expand your online marketing strategies?
An Introduction to Website Performance Monitoring and Assessment
December 2, 2008 by Melissa Donovan · 2 Comments
Most small business owners and independent professionals invest considerably in their websites. They pay good money for design and content, and in return, they expect the site to perform well.
But what does that mean? How do we measure website performance? And what are the benefits of website performance monitoring and assessment?
Some website owners track their statistics obsessively. They log in to their statistic tools several times a day to see how many visitors they’re getting. We’ve come to think of website performance purely in terms of traffic. How many hits? How many pageviews? Then we go out and try to increase these numbers, forgetting that a proper assessment is far more involved.
Website Performance Monitoring Tools
There are a vast number of website performance monitoring tools available. Your website hosting company may provide a statistics tracking tool as part of your hosting package, and if not, there are plenty of options to choose from. Some of these tools require payment while others are absolutely free.
My favorite statistics tool is Google Analytics, and it happens to be one of the free options. It offers plenty of detailed information that you can use to understand how your website is performing.
Google Analytics uses your Google account, so if you have Gmail or use Google Reader, then you’ll already be logged in, which makes for fast and easy access. Plus, if you use Adwords or any of Google’s webmaster services, everything is nicely connected and easy to use.
Basic Statistics
At the most basic level, you want to have an idea of how many people are visiting your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Additionally, you should know what the visitors are doing while they’re on your site. How many pages are they viewing? How much time are they spending on your website?
Below is a list of datum that Google Analytics and most other statistics tools provide so you can assess your website performance:
Visits is the number of times your website was visited in a given period of time (most statistics tools allow you to specify a time period). This is also sometimes referred to as the number of hits your site is getting.
Absolute Unique Visits provides you with the number of unique visitors to your site. One person might visit your site five times in a week. This statistic tells you how many visitors you had instead of how many total visits.
Pageviews indicates how many pages on your site were viewed. One visitor might have looked at five pages, so comparing the number of pageviews to the number of visitors can help you determine how much content the users are experiencing.
Time on Site shows how much time visitors spent on your website. This number is averaged to show you how much time each visitor spent perusing the site. Keep in mind that visitors might have your site open in their browsers when they’re not actively exploring your site, so this data has the potential to be misleading, however, it is worth noting.
Bounce Rate tells you the percentage of visitors who “bounced” away from your site immediately. If your bounce rate is high, that means visitors are not sticking around to check out your content. If it’s low, that means folks who visit your site are exploring it in more depth.
All of these statistics help you gain a basic understanding of your website performance. But knowing how many visitors are coming to your site may not be very helpful in a true website performance assessment. To get a better perspective, you’ll need to dig deeper and ask relevant questions.
Asking Questions
Before you engage in any kind of website performance assessment, your first step should be to identify your website’s primary purpose. The purpose may very well be to attract as many visitors as possible, in which case the basic statistics could tell you almost everything you need to know.
However, most businesses are concerned with another primary goal: turning a profit. So, the real question is not how many visitors are coming to your site, but how is your website performance contributing to the overall growth of your business and revenue? Are the visitors who are finding their way to your site looking for what you offer? When they get to your site, are they responding to your call to action (clicking on a link, subscribing, or making a purchase)?
Let’s say you’re a makeup artist who provides services for bridal parties. In your bio, you’ve stated “I started learning how to apply makeup when I was nine years old. My mom was a beautician and she always let me experiment with her cosmetics.”
One day, you check your statistics and are thrilled to discover that your site is getting over 1000 visitors per day. You sit back, thinking that business is going to boom any minute now. But what if out of those 1000 visitors, 999 were searching for “how to apply makeup?” Those folks weren’t looking for your services, and it’s doubtful they need your services at all.
Advanced Statistics
Digging deeper into your statistics will help you assess your website performance in a meaningful way that contributes to your business and online success, and this means going beyond the basic number of visitors or number of pages those visitors are viewing on your site.
Let’s look at some of the more advanced statistics that you can use to assess your site’s performance:
Traffic Sources: How are people finding your site? Are they entering your URL into their browsers? Are they using a search engine? Are they clicking on a link from some other site? Understanding the channels through which visitors are arriving is essential, especially if you plan on growing your traffic.
Traffic source information will not only tell you how visitors are arriving at your site, it will specify which sites are sending traffic your way. You can also learn which search engines send you the most visitors. Then, you can leverage this information to your advantage during future development and expansions to your site.
Keywords is one of the most important statistics because it shows you which keyword searches are generating traffic to your site. Why is this so important? Because this data tells you whether search engine users who are landing on your site are a match to your business offerings.
Going back to our example of a bridal makeup artist who is gaining most of her website traffic from the phrase “how to apply makeup,” one would assume that folks searching for “how to apply makeup” are not looking for a makeup artist, but are probably looking for articles or tutorials that deal with application of cosmetics. Instead, our makeup artist should work at gaining traffic that is more targeted to her service offerings.
Content gives you an in-depth look at which pages on your site are most (and least) popular. You can extract an ordered list that shows your most-viewed and least-viewed pages. If your goal is to lead the majority of visitors to your sales pages, then this information can tell you whether you are reaching that goal.
Top Landing Pages shows you which pages are the point of entry for visitors. There’s a good chance most visitors are landing on your home page, but you might want to make some adjustments if visitors are instead landing on a less desirable page (especially if they’re then quickly clicking off-site).
Top Exit Pages gives you the same information, but focuses on which pages visitors are looking at when they decide to leave your site. Perhaps you’ve got a link that’s driving visitors (and perspective customers) elsewhere.
There are additional statistics that you might want to look at. For example, let’s say you’re planning to redesign your website and want to use some advanced technology in the new design. It would be helpful to know which operating systems and browsers your visitors are using so you can figure out whether those visitors will have access to your flashy new site (or whether it will crash their computers).
Assessing Website Performance
When you are assessing your website performance, it’s essential to first identify your website’s core objective. Then, ask thoughtful questions about which statistics will provide you with the data you need to properly assess whether your website is fulfilling its purpose.
Once you know what basic data to collect, you can use that data to draw conclusions about how your website is performing. You can also use this information to make decisions about how to move forward with your website, especially if you’re planning to expand or redesign your site.
Once you know which information is pertinent to your objectives, you can conduct regular website performance monitoring. This will help you stay abreast of how your website is performing in the online marketplace.
Don’t have time to monitor your website performance? Need help putting together a detailed assessment? Scribizzy offers a number of website performance reports and assessments, and they are all designed specifically to help you make smart decisions about the future of your website so you can increase your success on the web. Get a quote online!
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