How to Effectively Design Your Business Website

July 3, 2010 Posted by: Michael Hendershot

4 Focuses

Business owners and web designers alike undergo common pitfalls when designing a website, by ignoring one or more of the features of what makes a site effective. Overall, there are 4 key qualities that will make or break your site. They must be used in congruence - focusing too much on one while slightly ignoring another can sabotage your website. These 4 focuses for an effective website are:

1. Business Objectives - Does it solve your business goals?
2. Usability - How easy is it for your customers to use? (Google and Craigslist are great examples of this)
3. Functionality of code - Does the code do what it is supposed to?
4. Design aesthetics - How does it look?
Let's take a further look into each of these elements.

1. Business Objectives

This is your priority above all others. A great-looking site that doesn't fit your business objectives is like creating a sleek, pretty magnet that doesn't attract metal.

You first must decide what is the goal of your website. Is it just to give your company a professional image on the web? Is it to provide a potential customer with enough information to want to contact you? Or is it to directly sell your products with e-commerce? What is your marketing plan to get customers to your site? If it's SEO (like attracting customers from Google), then your site must be content-heavy. If it's referring them to your site from flyers and business cards, they already have interest and this is your opportunity to close the deal. Who is your target customer? What will they like about your business that they won't like about your competitor's? How will your site convey this? In your industry, what will they make their final decision to buy or contact you from - credibility? product information? Everything else will revolve around these business objectives.

2. Usability

Is your website easy for your target customer to use? Let me highlight this again - not easy for you to use, but easy for your target customer to use. If your customer is typically in a low-income level, they may use an outdated browser, a slower connection speed, and an older, smaller computer monitor, so large, flashy web pages with high-resolution images is a bad idea, no matter how nice it looks to you.

Make sure your website follows these general rules for usability:

• Navigation bar is consolidated, easy to find, and easy to use
• The most important content is visible without scrolling
• Contact page link is easily visible from every page
• Quick load time, meaning limited image file size and limited flash
• Footer included with contact information and navigation links
• Important information stands out from the rest, either by size, color, placement, or other ways of emphasis
• Text is scannable - Highlighted keywords, short paragraphs, bulleted lists, images in between

3. Functionality of Code

Whether designing or having the site coded from scratch or using a code-generating software like Dreamweaver, it is critical to make sure the code correctly achieves what it's created for. This does not mean that it just shows the way you intend on your computer browser, but that it displays correctly across all internet browsers, the most popular being Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. If you're hiring web designers in Tampa, ensure that each aspect of the site displays and functions properly in each of these browsers, including the site's navigation, table rows and columns, flash, images, and forms. If you have executed everything else correctly, you may sacrifice it all and lose sales simply because an Order link or contact form function works incorrectly in Internet Explorer, due to an incorrect line of code.

4. Design Aesthetics

Because of the amount of detail involved, we've dedicated the next upcoming article, "Design a Visually Captivating Website," to design aesthetics.

"Don't Judge a Book by its Cover" - A Message Ignored by Website Visitors

Your website visitors have no choice but to judge your business immediately by the look, usability and functionality of your website. Let's be honest - the average customer has little patience, energy and trust when purchasing a product or service from an unknown company, especially when they're comparing it to 5 other companies. What does this mean for your business and its website? You have little time and opportunity to impress them. Gain their trust with a professional, well-designed website, save them time with effective navigation and layout, and save them energy by providing them the exact content they need to make a decision to buy your product or service - meeting all 4 focuses - design aesthetics, usability, functionality, and business objectives.

Why Your Business Needs a Professional Website

July 10, 2010 Posted by: Brandon Craft

Your website is your business's clothes

Would you show up to a business meeting with a client or investor in a t-shirt and sweat pants? Maybe, if it were representative of your company. But if you're selling anything besides sweat pants and t-shirts, it's important that your image represents the professionalism and quality of your products or services. Online, your website is your business' clothes.

You're losing business without one

If you have ever gone on vacation, you have probably experienced browsing through a multitude of hotels. Did you book an immediate reservation at the hotel with no photos posted and no information listed? It's more likely you chose the hotel with a professional image, price rates listed, photos of rooms, and detailed information about what they have to offer. These hotel listings are much like your business and its direct competition. If your competition has everything your potential customer needs to make a decision to purchase, and you have no website in comparison, it makes the customer's decision easy to avoid your business.

It's the foundation to all your online marketing and a stronghold to your direct marketing

Do you promote your business with direct marketing like flyers or postcards? Do you network and hand out business cards? Or do you market online? Either way, you'll point that potential customer somewhere for further information and pursuasion if you're not closing the sale at that exact moment. This is where your website comes in - it says as much about your company as any advertisement can, and can be accessed anywhere there is internet, at any time. You'll even soon realize that you won't have to find as many customers - they'll find you.

Customers expect it

With the exponential growth of technology and use of the internet, a website for a business is expected. Not having a company website now is like a business not having a phone 20 years ago. It's improved customer service your business provides by answering questions and accepting contacts, even when your office is closed. Provide potential clients with further information, invoices and useful forms, links to helpful resources, and contact forms to get in touch with you when you're out of reach.

It takes a customer less than 5 seconds to decide to stay or leave your website

Customers will either give you their business or they won't. If they have no past experience with your company, and come across your website, that's solely what they will base their decision on. If your site does not woo them in the first 5 seconds, it's likely they will leave and never return. In the long run, an unprofessional website can lose many potential customers. Our company, for example, made a key decision in its early stages to re-design our entire website. Within months, we experienced a 300% increase in the number of clients filling out a contact form. This investment was paid off within a month by the increase in business.

So what's the next step for your business

There are many customers currently looking for your service as you read this. Each day you wait, you lose several interested potential customers. Whether you don't have a website, or your current website lacks professionalism, it's time to take the step to prevent further missed opportunities and revenue. Either invest your own time to design a website or hire a professional web design company. Since you're taking the time and making the investment, make sure it's designed correctly. Whatever your budget or schedule, remember this is an investment that will last the life of your business.

Top Small Business Tech Tools for 2009 - 2010

July 21, 2010 Posted by: Michael Hendershot

Online Marketing

Search Engine Marketing - Google AdWords allows you to display your ads, which link to your website, on Google at a pay-per-click rate, dependent on the visibility you choose for each ad, so your online marketing directly revolves around your budget. You create the ad, choose the keywords, and determine the cost. Google sends you a monthly report listing of where your ads appeared, the number of clicks, cost and conversion data.
Free Website Statistics Tool - Google Analytics provides you with detailed statistics about your website's visitors, like where they're clicking on your site from, how long they stay, and what pages they visit, just to name a few features. It's easy to use for the technically unsavvy, offers the features of most costly analytics programs, and best of all, it's free.
SEO Tool - IBP (iBusinessPromoter) and Web CEO were voted the top 2 SEO software packages by experts and clients. Both SEO packages will increase your rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo. They both provide general SEO tools that include search engine submitter and checker, link building and management, competitor analysis, keyword research and analysis, and performance reporting. IBP (iBusinessPromoter) offers clients results in the top 10 rankings on Google or their money back, and has a prestigious client list with names like eBay and Canon. Web CEO goes slightly further than SEO and assists in overall website marketing and promotion, offering more features than most SEO software.

Software

Accounting - Is your business on good terms with the IRS? Is your financial information organized? Intuit Quickbooks Pro provides easy-to-use bookkeeping for small business owners, despite your level of accounting savviness. To minimize mistakes or loss of documents, all files and folders are stored online, which also allows for constant collaboration between employees, accountants, and customers. QuickBooks tracks expenses and revenue side by side, displays most recent transactions, creates invoices, provides banking features, and more.
Graphic Design - Adobe Creative Suite 5 offers top-quality, productive, interactive design tools so you can create and deliver the most effective graphics across media and devices. Adobe offers all the design tools needed by the small or large business owner, including web design, logo design, print design, 3-D design, flash and more.
Customer/Sales Management - ACT by Sage is an easy-to-learn tool to store all your business contacts into one central location. It helps you maintain an organized view of of all the people you do business with, by maintaining their contact information and social media profiles, attaching important documents and tracking upcoming activities related to them, keeping a history of all previous interactions, and more. Send an email marketing campaign to any group of contacts, on a consistent basis over time and track the results. ACT also works with over 10 popular software solutions like Microsoft Outlook.

Security

Security - Norton Protection Suite Small Business Edition has many features to protect the information of your small business. Its core protection is against viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, worms, bots and rootkits. It also stops threats with a two-way firewall, which is important for small businesses with many computers connected through networking and wireless internet. In addition, Norton automatically detects and stores passwords and personal information, secures PCs when connecting to WiFi, finds and fixes problems that slow your computer, and provides tips on how to keep your PC running efficiently, just to name a couple features.
Backup and Recovery - Genie Backup Manager backs up more types of data than any other consumer data backup software on the market, including backup for emails, Internet settings, your computer's index settings and more, allowing more customization than most other backup software. DT Utilities PC Backup offers a wide range of features, has a simple, one-click backup and one-click restore button, and provides full image backup.

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