Is your website marketing-driven or driving visitors away?

A website is a marketing tool.

Probably one of the priciest in your communications arsenal aside from digital advertising. But digital advertising…..and any other marketing you do….is directed at sending potential new business to your website where, hopefully, you’ll either intrigue the visitor to learn more or make a sale.

What’s your goal for your new website?
This is one of the first questions we ask when working with a new client. Another is: how do you envision this site will build your business? And more importantly, have your figured out how your business will solve a problem for potential customers?

Before we write a single line of code, we need to answer these questions. As specifically as possible.

If you haven’t established clear goals for your website and identified your target market’s pain point, good luck creating content that converts.

You need a better mousetrap.
Let’s suppose you’re a startup. You’ve designed a new and better product than what’s currently on the market. How are you going to convince potential customers that your product really IS better? What are you going to say?

A few things to consider first:

  • Is your marketing plan complete?
  • Do you know who your competition is, what their price points are and where they sell?
  • Do you know their USP (unique selling proposition) – what makes them different and better than the rest of the players?
  • Have you defined your USP? Why should buyers consider your product? How will it solve a problem for your (potential) customer?
  • Do you have a budget?
  • Have you allocated that budget across all your marketing tools? The ones that will help drive business to your website?

You can see where we’re heading. These are important questions that your web development team should ask at your first planning meeting. If they don’t, you may not be happy with the end result.

Developing a website doesn’t happen in a vacuum. A marketing-driven website…the kind you want….is informed by a marketing strategy.

make it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for on your website.
Make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for.

A successful website does far more than look good.

Just looking good won’t cut it. A successful website has to hit all the bullets on your to-do list. And on ours.

A few of those “musts”. Your website has to:

  • be a spot-on representation of your brand
  • be visually appealing
  • speak in your brand voice
  • engage the visitor
  • immediately address your visitor’s problem, need or pain point
  • be very easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for (UX or user-friendly)
  • speak in authentic and conversational language.

Is your company website marketing-driven and engaging visitors…or driving visitors away?

If you’re not sure, here’s a really good article we found on Harvard Business Review by Mark Bonchek and Vivek Bapat on why you should focus on potential buyers.

It’s well worth your time to read.  Then, if you need help, call us. We’re happy to talk about how we can help you.

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Getting Down To Business with Good Website Design

We were excited to be on Shalom Klein’s radio show, Get Down to Business, yesterday. We talked about good website design, what makes a website great and why our clients like to work with us. Many thanks to Shalom for the shoutouts. And yes, we’d love to come on your show again!

  

Listen to our interview.

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It’s OK to turn down business.

turning down business
Sorry, we can’t help you.

It happens to all small business service providers if you’ve been in business long enough. You meet with a potential client. She needs a fill-in-the-blank-with-what-you-offer and wants you to quote on it. In our case – a new website.

You go back to the office, review your meeting notes and consult with your partners. Something feels off. You might not be able to put your finger on it but you have a bad feeling about this potential project. Maybe the person you met with was argumentative, negative or challenging. Or it could be just one of those gut things.

What do you do?

Don’t do this: We NEED the Business.

First of all, how badly do you need this business? Enough to put yourself through a month or two of misery? Because that’s what you might be getting into.

It’s one thing when your business is new and you need all the work you can get. You might overlook the danger signs and figure it will be fine once the project starts. Or just accept the stress as part of launching a new business. We get it. We’ve been there.

But after you’ve been established for a while, will you do the same?

Do THIS!

If you’ve been in a caustic relationship a few times, odds are you won’t be eager to say yes. Unless you really need the income, it boils down to a simple decision: are you willing to subject yourself to a difficult and stressful situation? Or would you be better off saying “Sorry, we don’t feel we can help you” and moving on?

We had this happen a few weeks ago. A potential client approached us to build a website. She seemed nice enough. We gave her a proposal. She called to say our quote was too high and asked us to drop our fee. Then she wanted to know how many hits we could guarantee to the site we would build for her.

After a brief company discussion, we declined the job.

Not because of her problem with our fee. We understand that not everyone can pay what we charge for a website. Even though our fees are well within the reasonable range for small business website development, not all small businesses have marketing budgets. We get it. It was the “give us a guarantee” ask that turned us off.

Google and Facebook ads have changed organic search. Now there are many variables and active competition for those 4 or 5 first page queries. Search positioning is still related to how well your site is written and the organic use of keywords, but we will not offer a guarantee.

We will, however, advise you on things you can do to help your website work for you. For example….

  • using social media to promote your site
  • adding new content reflecting changing keyword usage
  • staying on top of what you competitors are doing (are they advertising and if so, where?).

And if you want to ramp things up, we can connect you with folks who’ll help you run Google ad campaigns to keep you visible in search results for targeted terms.

The Upside of Saying No

So if your gut is telling you this might not be a great client for you, listen. Something else will come along. It usually does. In our case, a few days later, we met with a really nice client whose new website we are happily designing.

To read more on working with dysfunctional people, here’s a great blog post by Daphne Gray-Grant about dealing with difficult editors. Pretty much applies to difficult clients as well.

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Why WordPress?

At least once a month, we get a frantic query from someone with a website they can’t update. Their web designer or developer is AWOL They don’t know how…. can’t remember…never learned how to manage their site. So it’s basically useless.

Can we help?

Unfortunately, the answer is almost always no. We can’t do anything with a proprietary program. All we can do is offer to build a new site on an open source platform (like WordPress) so they don’t ever have this issue again.

why we build WordPress websites

According to WordPress, there are currently 51,494 WordPress plugins.

There are plugins for every functionality your website requires — content management, link checkers, SEO, blogs, calendars, memberships, forms, image compression, spam, and security…to name a few. Lots are free; others are very inexpensive.

That alone might be reason enough for us to be huge WordPress fans. But there’s more.

Robust. Secure. Powerful.

We love that WordPress is an industry-standard, powerful open source platform that offers frequent feature-rich updates and expandability. And that it’s robust and secure in a hack-and-spam-crazy world. And that it’s supported by a huge and active developer community that help one another troubleshoot issues. So if you have a problem with something special you’re trying to do, there are plenty of people to help you solve it.

But the A Number 1 reason?

WordPress meets a huge criteria of ours – usability. Quite simply, WordPress makes our clients’ lives easier.

Not Just A Website

Almost all the websites we build are on the WordPress platform. Because we’re not just building a website for your business — we’re developing what is probably the most important tool in your marketing toolbox. The face of your business. Open to the world round-the-clock. Accessible to anyone looking for the type of products or services you offer.

When you’re busy running a business, keeping your website current may not be high on your list of “must do’s”. But it might be the difference between making a sale or losing out to a competitor whose website is fresh and compelling.

No Techie – No Problem

With WordPress, you don’t need to be a techie to make updates and add new content. Got a hot new product you need to feature on a new page? Simple. Need to add some sweet testimonials to drive new business? Couple of minutes.

WordPress offers an intuitive CMS (content management system) with a short, sweet learning curve. Unabashed sales pitch: training is always included as part of our website development packages.

Generally, an hour of one-on-one is all that’s needed to get you up and running. It’s THAT user-friendly. But we stick around to help you out if you need a little extra support.

WordPress Around the World

Think it’s just smaller companies using WordPress? Think again. A few of the big brands with WordPress sites:

  • Facebook
  • Disney
  • Sony
  • Bloomberg
  • The New Yorker
  • TechCrunch
  • CNN
  • BBC America
  • The New York Times
  • Microsoft News Center
  • Beyonce
  • Star Wars
  • TED

So next time you’re in the market for a new website, find a developer who builds on WordPress. We promise it will make your life a whole lot easier.

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Six features your website must have.

Websites differ in design and style. But there are certain features that all good websites have in common. Here are 6 of them:

  1. Readability
    Legibility is paramount when reading digital copy. Can viewers read the copy on your website? REALLY read it? On a cell phone or tablet as well as a laptop?A good website is designed for ease of reading on ALL screens. That means fonts are web-friendly, reverse type is used judiciously (white type can be dramatic but it’s hard to read as body copy) and clutter is kept to a minimum.
  2. Clear Messaging
    Will visitors to your site clearly understand what it’s all about? Or will they have to fiddle around to discover who you are and what you do?Once someone lands on your site, you’ve 15 seconds to convince him to stay.

    Good websites keep visitors engaged.
    Good websites keep visitors engaged.

    Especially if your product or services fix problems for people. People looking for something they need are generally not very patient. Continue reading “Six features your website must have.”

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