Small Business Website Design
March 8, 2010 by Melissa Donovan · Leave a Comment
Your website only has a few seconds to make a stunning first impression. That means the design has a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. The colors have to be inviting. The images need to be compelling. The layout must be user-friendly. Your business brand and mission have to be communicated clearly and effectively.
Scribizzy builds sites that have style, substance, and purpose. We specialize in small business website design, and our goal is to create a site that resonates with your target customers, a design that reflects your brand while showcasing your products and services.
All of our sites are built using a robust content management system, which allows you to log in and manage the content on your site. You’ll be able to add pages, alter the text, work with images. It’s as easy as using web-based email! So you don’t have to rehire us every time you want to make a small change to your site (although if you want to hire us to update your site, we’d be more than happy to oblige).
Because we’re dedicated to serving small business owners, we developed our website design services to be flexible and affordable. We’re also focused on delivering designs that resonate:
- Brand Consistency – a look that aligns with your business logo, image, and philosophy
- Customer-focused and user friendly – we create your website with your customers in mind
- Flexible – if you want to tweak or upgrade your design later, we won’t have to rebuild it from the ground up
- Manageable – you’ll be able to change the text and images on your site in minutes
- Affordable – we can work within your budget and deliver a professional site that’s also affordable
If you have a tight budget today, we can create a simple, cost-effective design for you. Since we use a flexible design system, you can start with the basics and upgrade your design later. In other words, we can build a site that will grow with your business, not a site that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every time you’re ready to expand.
Want to learn more? Visit our Website Design page. Ready to get your small business website design underway? Get a quote online.
A Rough Guide to Business Blogging for Absolute Beginners
March 1, 2010 by Melissa Donovan · Leave a Comment
So, you have a small business and you’re thinking about adding a blog to your website. You’ve heard that a blog can help your business attract new customers while building loyalty among existing customers. And you’re right; business blogging is a great way to grow your business online.
But blogging is a world unto itself. Think of your blog as a house on the web. Other blogs dealing with topics that are similar or relevant to yours make up your neighborhood. Like all houses, your blog needs to be carefully planned and maintained. And if you want to be a successful member of your community, you’ll have to connect with your neighbors.
Like a home, a blog is an investment. You can invest dollars by hiring a professional blogger to manage and maintain your blog or you can invest your own time and to learn how to do it yourself.
The Rough Guide to Business Blogging
This guide is for small business owners who want to explore business blogging as a way to grow their online presence. The list below includes basic elements to help you get started blogging. It’s by no means an exhaustive list. There is an endless array of blogging activities that you can do to build and grow your blog. But this list does include the bare essentials.
Check Out the Neighborhood
Start by subscribing to blogs in your niche. Find businesses like yours (some of these will be your competitors) and find businesses that complement yours. If you’re an architect, find blogs about construction. If you’re a hairstylist, find blogs about makeup application. Use an RSS reader or subscribe by email. Then, incorporate blog reading into your daily schedule. This is the single best way to get familiar with business blogging. Watch and learn. And make sure you visit the blogs you read directly so you can check out the features on site and view the comments.
Draw a Blueprint for Your House
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with blogs in your niche, start putting together a plan for your blog. What topics or issues will you address? Make a list of possible post titles. Write down the categories that you’ll use to organize your posts. Be sure to think about features you want for your blog, such as plugins that make your blog more attractive to readers (CommentLuv) or that make your blog easier to find on the web (All in One SEO). Learn how to use these features to your advantage.
Put Your House on the Map
Once you launch your blog, focus on creating excellent content. Every article you post should be useful to your readers. And make sure you know exactly who your target readers are. What questions do they have? What kind of help or tips do they need? Answer their questions and fulfill their needs. Will you use your blog to reach out to customers? Other professionals in your industry? Are you establishing your expertise and credibility or are you sharing news and information about your service offerings? With business blogging, a healthy mixture of all these approaches will work best.
Hit the Road
Now that you know your way around your neighborhood and have your house fitted with great content, start connecting with other bloggers. Visit those blogs you’ve been reading and make it a point to leave comments. When folks comment on your blog, be sure to reply and then head over to their place to reciprocate. Set up a Facebook page and mention your posts on your Twitter stream. Add a link to your email signature. Tell your friends and colleagues about your blog and be clear about how they can benefit from reading it.
Build Your Community
You’ll start building your community when you’re out on the road promoting your blog. Return to home base every once in a while (be sure to keep those posts coming regularly!) to make sure your visitors are comfortable. Use questions to encourage readers to comment and participate in discussion. Throw a little contest, host a giveaway, and make your home the hottest spot on the block.
Bring it Home
Throughout the business blogging process, you’ll pick up a lot of blogging techniques and strategies simply by observing other bloggers. Notice how they format their posts. Do they use images or video? How does the layout affect you as a reader? What do they blog about? Ask yourself what other bloggers in your neighborhood are doing to be successful and then bring it home so you can succeed too.
Scribizzy offers a range of blog services to help small business communicate with customers and market their products and services on the web. Want to learn more? Get a quote online.
How to Plan Your Website: Design Tips for Non-Designers
February 22, 2010 by Melissa Donovan · 4 Comments
In any website design project, the planning phase is the most critical. If you’re working with a website designer, it’s essential that you communicate your vision clearly so that the designer can make your vision a reality. And the designer must communicate her vision too, providing clear examples, ideas, and images that will help you understand what the site will look like once it’s completed.
There are three basic components to any design: the design itself (look and feel of the site), content (text and images that will appear on the site), and functionality (how it works).
As you work with your designer, you need to keep all of these components in mind. Additionally, there will be a learning curve for both of you as your designer studies the nature of your business in order to reflect it appropriately in your design and as you learn about the many options available to you in terms of how your business will be presented to an online audience.
Throughout the planning process, clear communication is key to building a good relationship with your designer and to your designer building a great site for you.
I thought I’d share some basic website design tips that will help you work with a designer to hammer out the details of your design plan. By working as a team with a shared goal and by focusing on communications and smart planning strategies, you and your website designer can build a stellar website together.
Website Design Tips to Help You Get Through the Planning Process
1. You Don’t Need a Vision — Most designers are thrilled when a client gives them complete creative control over a design project. If you’re not sure which direction to take in terms of design, consider giving the designer some leeway. Tip: Ask for samples to make sure you like the designer’s work, and pay special attention to the designer’s own sites since they’ll offer a good example of her style.
2. Use Examples — Nothing is clearer than a visual example. Spend some time surfing the web and find different website designs that appeal to you. Be sure to scroll through the pages and note what you do and don’t like. Collect a few URLs (links) and then send them to the designer with your thoughts about each one. Tip: Start with your competitors, but branch out into other fields too.
3. Don’t Overdo It — If you send your designer 100 examples, there’s going to be a lot of confusion. Shoot for sending your designer three to five examples of designs that you like with notes highlighting what appeals to you and why.
4. State What You Want — Be specific about what you like and what you want. If you send your designer three links to sites you like that are all extremely different from one another, she’s not going to be able to figure out which elements you like best unless you communicate your preferences to her. Offer comments about each site’s design. Do you like the colors? The layout? Does the site boast features that you’d like to see on your site? Is the content similar to yours?
5. Mention Your Dislikes — If there’s a design element you’ve seen but don’t like, make sure you let your designer know about it lest she use it on your site!
Avoiding Feature Creep
Try not to engage in feature creep. What’s that?, you ask (I’m so glad you asked). Feature creep is when you see the final design for the first time and suddenly come up with a bunch of new ideas that were not included in your original project scope and expect the designer to add these features to your design at no additional charge.
Examples of feature creep are as follows: Actually, I think I would like a form on the contact page after all. I know I said I didn’t want a blog on my site, but now I do. Those colors just aren’t working for me. Oh, by the way, while you were working on the site, I had a new logo made. Most feature creep requests are followed by a statement like, That’ll only take a minute or two, right?
It’s that last statement that qualifies a request as feature creep. Most designers do expect a project to expand a little as it unfolds and will build that into the price, but any big, time-consuming add-on (as well as a bunch of little add-ons) will incur additional fees. If you do want to make some serious changes, you should be upfront with your designer, because trust me, your designer wants you to be a very happy and satisfied customer. Just be aware that some post-design adjustments may show up on your final invoice.
Teamwork
Like any true professional, a website designer wants you to be pleased with the final product. But since it’s your website, you have an important role in explaining what you want your site to look like. As long as you communicate clearly and openly with your designer (and encourage her to do the same), the design process will flow smoothly and your website will come out looking exactly the way you want.
Scribizzy offers website design services for small businesses, independent professionals, and bloggers. Visit our website design page to learn more or get a quote online.
Five Quick and Easy Web Content Development Tips
February 16, 2010 by Melissa Donovan · Leave a Comment
If you have a small business, you probably don’t have time to sit around thinking about web content development. You’ve got a business to run and resources may be tight, but you know that you need to expand your online presence. Your customers are on the web and you want to be able to reach them. Where do you begin?
The trick is to stop thinking like a business and start thinking like a consumer. What do your prospective customers want? What problems are they facing and how do your products and services solve those problems? What makes your business the best one to patronize? Most importantly, how are your target customers using the web?
It shouldn’t take you long to answer these questions. In fact, if you’re already in business or if you’ve started laying the groundwork for your small business, then these are a few of the first questions you should have addressed. But all business owners lapse into entrepreneurial thinking. We get caught up in our own industries and fields of expertise. We forget that the consumer sees from a different point of view and speaks a completely different language.
Keeping the customer’s perspective in mind, you can apply the following five web content development tips to start creating content that will reach the right audience and get them to buy tickets to your show.
1. How-to Articles
You’re a pro at what you do, but your customers are novices. Don’t ever forget that. In addition to the products and services that you sell, you can give away your knowledge (advice) to make the customer’s experience more pleasurable. Let’s say you’re an electrician. You can just go to people’s houses and fix their wiring or you can leave a lasting impression and give your customers a branded flier that offers some tips on how they can maintain their electrical devices. Now, post those tips to your website and you’ve just added some useful content for your website visitors.
2. Case Studies and Storytelling
Once you’ve been in business for a few years, you’ll have some stories to tell. You’ll have stories about customers who benefited greatly from doing business with you and stories about customers who suffered because they didn’t. In the meantime, be creative. Use storytelling to show (not tell) people how your business offerings will improve their lives. If the story is long, add a page to your website. If the story is short, post it via your Facebook group. If it’s super short (140 characters or less), share it on Twitter.
3. Solving Problems
You need to think of your products and services as solutions. And you also need to think of your customers as people with a problem. Now, put the two together and explain to your customers how you can solve their problems. Many business owners tend to think that the problem/solution model is obvious. For example, our friend the electrician believes that if his customers have an electrical outlet that’s not working, they also know he’s the one who can help. But he needs to detail the problem and emphasize himself as the solution: Power outlets not working? Did you know faulty wiring and broken outlets can be a safety hazard? I’m here to help keep your family safe and make sure your electrical wiring works.
4.Transparency, Credibility, and Loyalty
For a small business, the best customer is a loyal customer. These are not only the customers that come back again and again, they’re also the customers that run around telling all their friends how great you are. They send you a lot of referrals. How do you land these kinds of customers? You start by building credibility. Establish your expertise and back it up with excellence. You can do this by publishing web content that showcases your top customers or by engaging in transparency. Write articles about your business processes. Explain your reasons when you make changes to your offerings or pricing. Let the customers come behind the scenes and help them become fans.
5. Find Their Haunts
Once you’ve got your website up and running, you have to drive traffic to it so you can convert that traffic into paying customers. In order to do that, you have to create even more web content and publish it around the ‘net. I call this peripheral content. It can be as short as a tweet or as long as an in-depth article. And it can be based on any of the four tips above. But you’ll need to find the haunts where your customers hang so you can get the content up on the wall. Here are a few bonus tips to help you find your people:
- FREE – Are you selling music, trendy clothing, or cheap eats? Trying to round up the teens? Get a spot on MySpace because that’s where the teens and tweens do the internet thing.
- FREE – Facebook offers a few different ways to connect. You can create a page or launch a group and then invite people to join or become fans. How do you find those people? Send an invitation to all your Facebook friends. Post updates to your wall. And add one of those how-to articles.
- PAID – Facebook also sells targeted advertising. So does Google and a number of other ad networks. Your ads will be shown to people who are either already searching for whatever you offer or who have expressed specific interest in it.
- FREE – Twitter’s great for relationship building. If you can carve out some time to engage on Twitter every day (or a few times a week), you’ll make some friends and they’ll share links to whatever good stuff you’re selling.
- FREE/PAID – Let’s go back to our friend the electrician. His main customers are homeowners. All he has to do is find out where homeowners hang out on the web and voila! He’s found his base. Search for forums where your customers hang out. Use your favorite search engine to find “homeowner forums.” If you service a geographic area, be sure to narrow your search appropriately (e.g. “homeowner forums new york”). Join the forums and participate in the conversation. Add value and grow your network.
- FREE/PAID – If you have web development skills, adding a blog to your site won’t cost a dime. Or, you can hire someone to take care of it for you. Either way, blogs that are properly designed and maintained have a tendency to draw traffic to a website. Blogs are great because your website visitors can subscribe and because they’ll get regular updates, they won’t forget about you!
And then there’s SEO, which helps make sure customers can find you via search engines, but that warrants a post of its own.
Web Content Development for Small Businesses
Building an effective online presence can have an exponential impact on the growth of your business. Think like a customer to create riveting content, then use social networking, blogging, and other online marketing efforts to bring visitors to your site and then convert them into customers.
Scribizzy offers web content development services for small businesses. We’ll devise a plan that’s tailored to your business and then create the content that brings the plan to fruition. Start growing your content today by getting a quote online.
SEO Keyword Research and Selection Process
February 8, 2010 by Melissa Donovan · 1 Comment
The English language is incredible. There are hundreds of different word combinations that can be used to communicate a single idea. And every combination is a possible SEO keyword phrase for some website. Maybe yours.
So how do you decide which words and phrases to use when you’re optimizing your website to increase search engine traffic? Do you choose the keywords with the highest search volume? The ones that you’re already using on your site? Do you pick keywords with the least competition?
All of these questions must be addressed through the course of developing a comprehensive SEO plan. But for a small business website, one question rises above the rest: Which search terms are your customers using?
SEO Keyword Choices
Putting together a proper SEO plan requires making sensible decisions about which keywords you’ll target and which ones you’ll ignore. Sounds easy, right?
Not so quick. As you conduct keyword research and start developing your ideas for an SEO plan, you’ll be faced with infinite choices regarding which keywords you should include in your SEO campaign. Many (too many) website managers make their decisions in a rash manner, often without giving any consideration to why one keyword might be a better choice over another.
I’ve actually witnessed small business owners and bloggers tackle the decision-making process in an arbitrary, freewheeling manner. So I thought I’d put together an article that addresses some of the considerations that should be involved in making choices among all of your keyword options. And chances are, you’ll have a lot of options.
Synonyms
A synonym is a word that has the exact same meaning as some other word. If you want to find synonyms galore, just open a thesaurus (or visit an online thesaurus). Look up the word buy and you’ll find out that one of its synonyms is purchase. This raises the question: Should you optimize your site with the word buy or with the word purchase? You’ll find that the synonym dilemma arises for every single SEO project. The ongoing challenge in the keyword selection process often involves deciding between synonyms and synonymous phrases.
Search Volume
Search volume refers to the number of searches a term receives in a given time period. For example, the word buy was searched about 68 million times on Google in January. Purchase only received about 6.1 million searches. Still, that’s a lot. A knee-jerk reaction might be to decide that you’ll use the word buy in your SEO because it gets more searches. But there are many cases in which it’s much better to target a keyword with a lower search volume (although you don’t want to go too low!).
Competition
If buy gets more searches than purchase, then more people probably use the word buy. Therefore, it will probably have greater competition, which means you have to work harder (publish more content, obtain more links) to see results. That’s something to think about. Maybe you could optimize for purchase and get a big chunk of the 6.1 million searchers within a few months whereas you could spend a year optimizing for buy and never see a single visitor as a result of your efforts. Don’t worry about which keywords get the most searches. Worry about which keywords will draw your customers and which ones will realistically lead to success.
Customers
The best way to start narrowing down your list of synonyms is to determine which words your customers use when referring to your products. For example, many musicians refer to their recorded music as “records.” They’ll say something like “We made the record for our fans.” But fans don’t search for records. They don’t buy or purchase records. So records are not what music lovers are looking for. The fans — the customers — the searchers — are looking for music. They want to buy or purchase music. Or songs.
Existing Keyword Traffic
Let’s say you sell music on your website. Should you optimize for purchase music or buy music? If you find that you’re already drawing a few visitors every month for the term purchase music but you’ve never drawn a single visitor for the term buy music, then you might be better off working on the former term. Whenever possible, leverage keywords that are already drawing traffic! For example, if purchase music brought in five visitors and you find your site ranked on page 35 of the search engine results pages, you should optimize and try to move up a few pages. Then, you should keep optimizing and try to move up a lot more pages.
Writer-Friendly
Some potential keywords and phrases don’t lend themselves to written content. This includes odd phrases that people will enter in search engines but that they wouldn’t normally say or write while communicating with other people. It also includes keywords that are misspelled (many searchers misspell their search terms). Keep in mind that when you finish your research and finalize your keyword selections, they will have to be implemented on your website, which means they will be written into the text. If you want the language on your site to be readable and correct, then you want to choose writer-friendly keywords.
Narrow the Search
Let’s face it, there’s a whole lot of music out there. You can get more specific about which music you’re selling. If you’re a full-service music store, you’d do well to choose a bunch of keywords with each one targeting a different genre or artist. You could optimize for purchase rock music or purchase pop music. Sometimes you’ll see better results optimizing for a larger pool of keywords that are highly specific and that have less competition.
Long-Tail Keywords
How specific can you get? I already mentioned artists and genres. What about format? Do you sell music downloads? Maybe instead of purchase rock music you should optimize for download rock music. As you add more words to your keyword phrase, it becomes a long-tail keyword, which is simply a keyword that consist of several words. These can be effective when used thoughtfully.
SEO is About Asking the Right Questions
When you start compiling a list of possible keywords, your head might spin. It’s truly mind-boggling how many words and phrases can be used to search for one product or service. As you go through your list of keyword possibilities, avoid making arbitrary or meaningless selections as much as possible. Try to cite a reason for every decision you make. If you eliminate a keyword from the list, make sure you have a reason why.
As you go through the process, asking the right questions is essential to informing your decisions. Think about each keyword and determine how many ways that term might be used by people searching for it. Are they more likely to be looking for your offering or is it possible the search term is even more applicable to something you don’t sell at all:
- If I optimize for download rock music, I might draw searchers who are looking for free downloads.
- If I optimize for purchase rock music, I might get visitors looking to buy sheet music or CDs.
- Should I optimize for buy rock songs online?
Sometimes you end up back at square one, and you have to go back and do more research. But it’s worth it. If you’re going to invest in a serious SEO campaign, you want to get the research and keyword selection right the first time.
Here’s a summary of considerations to keep in mind when making SEO keyword selections:
- Synonyms: Do you have a nice, long list of keyword possibilities to choose from?
- Search Volume: How many searches are conducted for each of the potential keywords?
- Competition: Which keywords are highly competitive in the SEO field?
- Customers: Which keywords do your customers use when looking for your products and services?
- Existing Keyword Traffic: Are you already seeing low volumes of traffic for some of these keywords?
- Writer Friendly: Lean toward keywords that are correctly spelled and fit naturally into written communications.
- Narrow the Search: To attract customers looking for exactly what you offer, narrow your language. Be specific.
- Long-tail Keywords: Be more specific. Use a larger number of keywords that have lower search volumes and less competition.
- Finally: Ask the right questions. Make sure you have a reason for each elimination or selection from your list.
SEO is a tedious process, especially the research and keyword selection phases. But once you get past the nitty-gritty grind of poring over lists of words, phrases, and statistics, you get to move to the next step: keyword implementation. And that’s when SEO gets fun.
Scribizzy offers a full suite of SEO services and can help you through any phase of your SEO campaign. Get a quote online.
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