Designing for Sales – Philadelphia Web Design

Your website is your online brochure, your portfolio, business card, the digital store front of your business. The first glance a visitor gets of your website is extremely important, you get an average of four seconds to make an impression which will color a visitors entire experience with your company.

You wouldn’t allow your cousin to design your logo/brochure for $50, you wouldn’t pay a contractor $200 to layout your store, and you wouldn’t hire a guy to answer your phones for minimum wage (at least you shouldn’t if you value the reputation of your business).

So why would you pay peanuts to have the brother of your receptionist, who’s taking IT at the local community college build your website for $300? The old axiom is true, “You get what you pay for.” And if your skimping on website costs then the first impression your going to make is a bad one.

So we’ve established that you shouldn’t cheap out on web design, but now what? What makes for good design? Pretty pictures? Going the slick, fancy, Flash Animation route? Tons of orange and gold because it’s your company colors?

If you’re like most business owners, websites intimidate you because it’s ‘new’ and ‘technology’. But keep your head! A website is not as difficult a project as you’re making it out to be.

Ask yourself, What is the job of my website?

• Gathering Sales Leads for Services or Products?
• Clarifying Information on a Topic?
• Presenting a Portfolio of Work and Clients?
• Providing a Database of Useful information?
• Creating Social Interaction on a Community or National Level?

Once you’ve figured out what you want your website to do, then all you have to do is design with that goal as the main (and I suggest ‘only’) focus. Websites that try to do too many things loose focus and if your website is all over the place, then your visitor is going to get lost in the morass you’ve created.

Some designers will tell you that making a website functional is the most important aspect of web design. Others will tell you that it’s the style and branding that catches visitors attention. The real answer is that it’s a combination of both. If you’re designer has no idea how to get your email form setup and creates dead links in your navi bar with little ‘under construction’ icons, fire him. If your designer creates a highly functional e-commerce site that has the visual appeal of drying asphalt, get your money back.

A web designer has to have a grasp of coding and a good sense of composition. The best designers are those who can wear many hats. An artist who’s learned how to code. An IT guy who’s taken some art classes. A code monkey photographer. A renaissance painter who dabbles in C++. There are so many varied skills required in creating great design that you either need a team of designers/coders/video/animators/marketers (web design company) or one of the above mentioned Renaissance men.

Good Design Tips (Appearance):

• Create an appearance that mimics your business ethic: clean, open, bright, subtle, rich, new, high tech, old world, one-on-one, personal service, corporate power… whatever best describes the way you want other people to view your business. Don’t look cheap, boring, plain… you can be a 400lb slob but your website should reflect your inner super hero.
• Use your company colors, many businesses have a logo or color they associate themselves with but then design their website in something else entirely. This is a bad idea, get those colors branded into people’s heads.
• Use photos you’ve taken yourself or stock, make sure they’re clear, clean and well lit (unless your advertising caves for sale or vampire stuff). Poor quality photos reflect a poor quality business.
• Details, don’t leave a pixel dangling, a header slightly off-center or a border off-color.

Good Function Tips (How your website works):

• Get to the point with as little steps in between your visitor entering the site and the information they’re searching for. If you sell pots, make sure they get to the pot page and then directly to the order form. Nobody cares about your funky intro. Nobody cares what your calendar of events are. Nobody cares about your Flickr photos. Get to the point. I’ve found that if people get what they want, they’ll browse the rest of your website after the finish doing business with you.
• Always have your contact information and your order/service request form on every page. Top of page for phone number, everything else in the footer. Don’t make people think about how to contact you or order your services, make it super obvious.
• Don’t get unique with your navigation. If people have to search around for your information then you’ve already lost. There are standard conventions that visitors have gotten used to that you NEED to observe. Always have a contact page on the Navi bar, always have the header link back to the homepage, Always keep the navigation bar on the left or top of the page and keep it consistent throughout the website. Funky navi bars that pop out of nowhere, float across the page or are only revealed after you click something are a navigational nightmare.
• DON’T make your Navi bar in flash. As unbelievable as it sounds not everyone has the plug-in (another reason, among a thousand more, not to design your entire website in flash) and if they’re running a Script-blocker it won’t show up.
• DON’T design your website all in Flash. Search Engines can’t see it, people have trouble loading it, some rare people can’t see it. Designers who use all flash sites are usually kids out of college with out a clue about visitor expectations, marketing to search engines or loosing people while they’re pictures load up. If you write me and tell me that search engines can now view flash links I will loose my shit, seriously, who cares about links? No search engine in the world cares more about the links on your site in comparison to the content you’ve just made invisible.
• No dead links, AT ALL. Not in your Navi, not in your content, not anywhere! If you’re building a page do NOT link it into your website until your done. DO NOT put up little under construction icons. Your website will look unfinished, amateur, not put together and that is EXACTLY how people will think of your business. There is nothing that pisses of a visitor more than clicking on your navi bar, looking for information, and getting a dead link. You might as well hang a sign on the homepage that says, “Unprofessional Business!”

Google Pay-Per-Click / Testing the Water

Sponsored Search or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is generally viewed as either a bane to Google’s main search engine (by the user) and a horribly expensive way to do business (by the advertiser). While the first point may ring true, with the current state of lousy advertising standards, the second point is a vile myth.

First off, people who tell you that you’re going to end up spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars on a PPC campaign are dolling out bad advice. You don’t have to spend more than $20, if that’s what your budget is. The fact is, nobody knows what your budget is going to be until you TEST THE WATERS.

Creating a test account on Google to suss out the real numbers of people searching for your product or service is something every business should invest in. PPC is NOT for everybody but you won’t know until you check things out. If you come up to me and say, “Oh, nobody clicks on those Spamy links.” or “It just doesn’t seem applicable to what I do.”, then you need to have your head examined, because your making a financial decision based on rumor and not hard facts.

Do you have $100 lying around? I have bills bigger than that and for a serious business this is not a lot of money. Google only takes credit cards, so it’s not real money anyway, just a small pile of accumulated debt that looks insignificant to the $4K you spent on IKEA furniture last weekend.

Here is How You Do It: (for people who are under the impression they are professionals)
1. Come up with a bunch of keywords you feel are relevant to what you sell, who you sell it to and where those demographics are located. This is a trial and error process that should be constantly tested and reevaluated till you get the right mix of words and phrases (a whole other article in itself).
2. Go to www.adwords.com and sign up for a new account. Select the Standard Account setting. Fill out your personal information.
3. Time to write an Ad, you’ll notice you’re limited to how many characters per line so get to the point and don’t use words like ‘best’ or ‘most’ (outlawed by google). For now keep it simple, we’ll get into writing effective ads in another article. Type in your main URL and then type in the URL link to the product or service on your website (you can make them the same but the ads will be more effective if visitors are taken directly to what they are looking for).
4. Set up your advertising location, be as specific as possible, I like to use the polygon to draw an accurate shape around counties in a state my clients serve. DON’T sign up for national by mistake, you’ll blow out that $100 in less than five minutes.
5. Set your daily budget at $10, Set your maximum per-click rate at $0.01 (this is for testing purposes, use the minimum and we’ll work up from there, later)
6. Now all you need to do is give Google your credit card info and your ads are off and running.

Alright, what is the purpose of setting the keywords at one penny? Well Google will run those ads in their system for a very short while, but it’s enough time to gather data on how many Impressions each keyword get’s before the ad is shut off. Why is it shut off? Well because DESPITE Google saying the minimum bid is one penny, they lie. In fact you’ll be forced to bump your keyword costs up to a minimum after a few hours. Anyway, the Impressions are the numbers you’re interested in right now, not having your ad up and running. You’ll quickly see which keywords get more traffic, which you’ll keep for now and remove the keywords that don’t perform well.

Impressions are the number of people who typed in your keyword in a search engine. They viewed your ad, but didn’t necessarily click on it. If ‘super ball’ get’s 1000 Impressions but ‘uber ball’ only get’s 3, you want to keep ‘super ball’ in your list.

There are exceptions to this rule, such as when you’re dealing with a highly specialized product. Say the keyword phrase ‘waste oil collection’, you may only get 40 Impressions, but it’s exactly what your business does, so keep it on hand for when we get *serious with your $100.

*With any type of PPC campaign Clicks are your goal, getting people to your website. But we are assessing if you need this service, NOT how many clicks you can get for spending little or nothing. Don’t expect sales at this point, we’re doing a research project.

Raise your keyword per-click costs to their new minimums ($1, $5, whatever Google tells you it is, it’ll be highlighted for you). Make sure that you can pay for at least ten clicks with your daily budget, so you’ll have to readjust from $10 to whatever the cost ($5/click would be $50).

Let it run for 24 hours.

Come back and repeat the process of raising keyword minimums and daily limits. The goal here is not to gather a ton of clicks; in fact you’ll be lucky to get any but to access the amount of traffic out there for your product and services.

Keep doing this till A) you run out of money B) a month has passed

Now you’ve got good data on what keywords work and if the Pay-Per-Click campaign is viable for your business. If you’re getting Impressions by the thousand/per day, PPC is right for you. If you’re getting a dozen or less than a hundred on all your keywords or even 85% of your keywords/per day then PPC is not for you.

If you find PPC is right for you then it’s time to move to the next step. Creating a budget and keyword list for a real campaign. The less in your budget ($50), the less keywords you should try and compete for. So choose the best keyword that gets good Impressions and is most relevant to your business and put all your money behind it. The more money, the more keywords, but start low and slowly grow your list so that you can keep a handle on costs and good data on what works and what doesn’t.

Email Campaigns - Philadelphia Internet Marketing

Today I woke up and to find a short message from a woman named Dyhan, who works for a company called 'Insert Boring Company Name'. She was pitching me to improve the Search Engine Profile of my website. After rolling my eyes and sipping my coffee I hit the SPAM button and sat down to ponder the error of Dyhan's ways.

Things she did wrong:

1. Didn't even bother to visit my website and see that I provide the service she's pitching.
2. Didn't have a link to her company website.
3. Sent a three sentence paragraph that was as generic as a Halmark Get-Well Card.
4. The email was unsolicited, I've never heard of their company before (not could I look them up since 'Insert Boring Company Name' turns up 24 companies on Google, without a link I was lost)

There are do's and dont's when it comes to Email Campaigns and she pretty much did everything a lazy campaign manager should expect. I'm fairly certain this woman/company bought or scraped together a general list of business emails and sent out a mass mailing. There was no research, no unique pitch to set her services apart from any one of a hundred different SEO companies.

You cannot expect to succeed if you don't do your research. Companies do not want to hear the same thing over and over and over. Your not the only guy in town, the internet is a huge town with thousands of vendors. The internet is not a world where your car has broken down in the middle of upstate PA and there is only one auto-mechanic shop in a 30 mile radius. Simply hanging a sign outside your door, "Search Engine Optimization for Sale" will not cut it. Much as it doesn't cut it for any other business with competition. Be unique!

First rule of a great Email Campaign, NO UNSOLICITED EMAILS. That's right, don't ever buy a list of emails you don't know anything about. This is the fast track to being banned by your ISP and loosing your email privileges. Most people treat unsolicited emails in one way, they hit the SPAM button, and that will kill your efforts very quickly. You need to collect emails from people who WANT to receive information from you. Former customers, referrals and demographics who you've ASKED if they want to receive the material and said YES. You may not have 10,000 emails but the 100 you do have are more likely to buy from you. In fact, out of 10,000 emails you'll probably only get 10 sales leads, where a carefully gathered email list of 100 will most likely bring in two to three times that.

I won't get into not linking your company to your email, that's just armature and not worth talking about.

Letting Your Fans Promote Your Business

Referrals are the best kind of advertising, nothing can beat someone telling their family or best friends to use your services because your a great company. Here at Seigfried Designs we try to utilize referrals so much that it's 98% of all our business. This week I ran across a great idea that I'd like to share with you and expand upon, to get your customers working for you.

Create a Digital Handout
The idea here is to create a page on your website that is a flier for your business, one place where all your important information can be copied, downloaded, linked to and sent via email quickly and easily. "Did you like our service? Tell a friend with our Online Flier!"

Things to make sure you include on this page:

1. A very brief description of your business and services, no more than a few sentences.
2. logo
3. one picture, preferably something to do with your business (if you recycle oil, then a tanker or a filter, if you sell dolls a doll, something people will remember)
4. Contact Information
5. Link to Email and Website
6. Link to Google Maps for Directions
7. Link to .zip, .stuffit, .rar file that includes this webpage and all files. To download for print or burn to CD.
8. Links to Service Agreements, Warranties, Guarantees, Coupons and other important documents.
9. Link to download brochure, business cards, stickers. Formatted to easily print from Microsoft Word at low resolution (keeps file size down) I would go with a non-traditional format for the brochure so that you can fit more catch phrases and information on a single side of a single sheet of paper. A tri-fold design would be less effective than say, 9 squares of information.