WSI WebStrategies Blog

We develop a lot of websites and often the first challenge is how to get everything that's really important onto the home page - since that's really your "first impression" or the "front door" to your internet marketing plan.  Here are the challenges we're dealing with:

• You have about 8 seconds to make sure the website visitor understands what your website is about.
• The average website visitor spends about 25 seconds on a home page.
• Less than one in four visitors to your website will scroll the home page.

Your home page website design must be simple, send a clear message, attract visitors to the important parts of your website, and anything that's important has to be above the fold.  So, here are some guidelines to follow when designing your home page:

1. Make sure your tagline is near the top, is simple and is a catchy way of communicating what you are.  It should be 6 to 8 words.
2. Have a welcome statement that's simple, not more than about 30 words and clearly describes what you do and how you benefit your customers.  Don't use your mission statement as your welcome message.  People just won't read it...blah, blah, blah - you know.
3. If your site is large, make sure you include a well labeled site search feature.
4. Place well labeled boxes or "conventions" that highlight the important parts of your site.

Remember, the goal of the home page is to get site visitors into the details - the sub-pages in your website.  When you are doing your web design work, give consideration to the aforementioned points.  The home page is the "front door" of your online presences and a critical component of your internet marketing activity. 

Internet marketing has become the most important element of your overall marketing campaign, and online brochure websites (flat, static website design) are losing out to the competition.  To compete online these days you have to include in your web development efforts some ways to enable your website visitors to interact with you, either passively or actively.  Beyond simply buying things online, consider web design techniques such as customer-oriented videos or podcasts.  Develop some helpful white papers and post them on your website for your visitors to download.  Online polls, forms and games are great ways to engage your customers online.  These are also effective at building your email database for future internet marketing. 

Go to the next level with your website.  Get creative about what would be helpful to your target market and how to engage them on your website.  These efforts will help you strengthen your brand, build your email database and add some umph to your viral marketing efforts.   

If you are like many you are wondering what's the big deal about social media or social networking online.  You might be asking yourself why some are making so much noise about Facebook, LinkedIn and those other online networks.  If you're over 40, you're not alone because most of the activity in these online networks is from the below-30 crowd.  But don't let that lull you to sleep if you're not part of that crowd because more and more these networks are becoming an important part of any internet marketing plan.

Online social networks are becoming powerful ways to build your brand and serve your customers.  As one not part of that under-30 crowd, I was struggling to understand why these networks are gettng so much attention.  And then with the help of one of our employees, the light came on - so to speak.  Every business should start thinking about how these social networks can impact their business.  There are two important elements to think about.  First, think about using these online networks to promote your brand, but don't be obvious about it.  Do it subtly.  Second, read and listen to what others are saying about you (good and bad) and interact with them.  It's a great way to identify and respond to problems, and to measure your reputation in the marketplace.

Even though your business may not appeal to the under-30 crowd, it will soon.  We are all getting older and before you know it, these online social networks will be filled with the "under-40 crowd" and even those of us with a few more years than that. 

While working with many businesses on their internet marketing plans, I often run into clients who want to look "cool" on the internet by using all kinds of crazy movement and flash applications.  These types of web design techniques have their place, but we always advise our clients to balance graphic design and creativity with good usability.  It's often a challenging balance, but it's one that should be worked.

Credibility is the single most important requirment for the internet - usability in website design is the second.  Once your graphic design and presentation online get you over the "credibility hurdle", be cautious about investing more time and money to be "cool".  The "credibility hurdle" as we call it is about making sure you look honest and reliable online.  If you do, you've achieved your first objective.  Now, make sure your graphic design, page layouts and navigation schemes are as intuitive as possible for the user.  In some cases, your online presentation might look dull to some, but if website visitors can easily use it and navigate through the site, they will find value and come back time and time again - because it's easy to use your website. 

So, invest in good web design to get you online credibility...then make sure your website is easy to use.  This will get you success with your internet marketing activities. 

Have you tried Google Calendar or Google Docs yet?  If not, you should check them out.  You can get there by clicking on http://www.google.com/apps/.  Google, as part of their desire for "world dominance", has brought forth some great tools for online collaboration, including a web-based calendar that you can share with those you deem appropriate, and a document management platform in which you can share all types of documents. 

We find these tools to be great ways for people to collaborate.  These are cost effective (free is good) solutions to situations in which groups of people seek to coordinate schedules by sharing their calendars, and want to share documents.  As a web development company, it is more important that we find cost effective solutions for our clients rather than find and/or build a custom solution.   We have found this to be the best way to retain clients for the long term. 

If you have a need to share a calendar with other people, check out Google Calendar.  If you get frustrated emailing attachments around the world, modifying them and having several versions saved on individual computers, check out Google Docs.  All it takes is to sign up and remarkably, there's no fee.        

Day after day we see clients wasting their internet marketing money.  It's a shame.  At least some clients have the wisdom to make sure their websites have an analytics tool, but in many cases they dont' know how to interpret the data.  

A client we recently began working with was spending a large amount of money on search marketing, but wasn't getting the sales conversions.  Fortunately the client was smart enough about adding an analytics package to the website.  One great thing about the internet is that everything can be measured...and as they say, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it."  A close inspection of her web analytics revealed very high bounce rates for almost all the keywords people were using to find the company.  The company was spending internet marketing money and getting very little, if anything, for it.  The keywords were all relevant, but not converting.  Why you ask?

In this case, the website is the problem.  A comparison of competitors' websites revealed this one was sub-standard.  Additionally, appearance and the messaging that came from the content were weak - and this created a lack of credibility for the company in the minds of the site visitors.  Long story short, our client was investing money to generate traffic to a site that failed to attract and convert those visitors...a real waste of precious financial resources.

The morale of the story is - invest in good web design, have a strong web analytics package and measure the effectiveness of your search marketing efforts.

It's one thing to get visitors to your website - it's another thing to motivate them to take the action you want them to take.  And as we know, it's all about sales, and the following information will help you maximize your internet marketing investments.  We're talking "landing pages" here.  That is, pages specifically designed to connect with the search phrase the visitor used to find your site.  Here's an example...

A company that provides inexpensive moving services might be targeting key-phrases that relate directly to home moving.  It also might be targeting phrases relating to moving rental trucks as a way to convince those visitors to use the company's moving services rather than rent their own moving truck.  When a customer searches for "moving truck rental" and clicks on that item on a search results page, he/she expects to see something about moving truck rentals.  If all your website presents is information about regular moving services, it is likely that customer will not find the information relevant to what he/she searched for and leave your site.  The result - search marketing money spent and no sale.

A web development technique to convert that customer to a sale is to design a "landing page" that relates to moving truck rental.  Perhaps that page shows an image of a rental truck and then talks about why people thinking about renting a truck should consider another type of moving service.  By doing this, the customer lands on a page that provides information about moving truck rentals and then works to persuade the customer to consider an alternative.  While you won't persuade every visitor with this type of approach, you will certainly improve your sales rate from what it was.

You may be hearing a lot about social media marketing.  Or you might just be hearing about this thing called Web 2.0.  Social media marketing is part of the Web 2.0 revolution.  It's all about using online communities and resources to communicate with others on just about anything.  It's turning upside down many of our traditional beliefs in marketing - and I'm not just talking about internet marketing. 

Think about social networking online to be the electronic (or online) version of talking to our friends, neighbors and family members about anything.  We often talk about our social networks - the people we talk to about a variety of things including getting their opinions about products and services.  The internet, through these online communites, is quickly becoming a meaningful and convenient place to solicit people's opinions on a variety of things.  These online communities take the shape of blogs, wikis and forums, and could very well include comments (good and bad) about your company's products and services.  Rather than hoping no one is saying anything negative about you, get involved.  There are numerous examples of companies using social media networking to strengthen their offerings and turn criticism into good will.         

Do a search for your name and your company, and look through what people are saying, if anything, about you.  Log into some of the large social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and do a search for your company and name.  Find out what people are saying about you.  Then, get yourself involved in social media marketing and get in front of this new marketing medium. 

The Web Marketing Association has awarded us a Standard of Excellence Award in the B2B category for the Creative-va.com website design project.  We're naturally proud but not totally surprised.  After all, we specialize in developing internet marketing business plans that meet the objectives of the organization in a compelling and creative way.  The client, Creative Office Environments located in Hanover, Virgina, has focused their growth on the future of work.  Creative is a very forward-looking organization so the website had to deliver a contemporary and visionary message through it's creative graphic design.

A website designed to communicate the "future of work" was an interesting project.  We had to be a bit edgy when it came to copywriting, and a bit out-of-the-box when it came to images.  We also deployed some interesting flash applications that communicated a futuristic perspective.  We're thrilled that our web design project was nominated and even more proud that it was selected for an award.   

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a phrase that often comes to mind is "Content is King and Links are Queen".  We are seeing some trends that indicate we should switch this around and consider Links as King.  Nevertheless, it's really hard to win the internet marketing and rankings battle without an aggressive link building campaign.  The search engines consider incoming links to your website as a "vote" of your popularity or importance.  The more "votes" coming to your site from other websites, the more important you become. 

Getting a vote from a very important website, counts much more than a link from a website that's less prominent from the search engine's perspective.  For example, a link from our website (www.webstrategiesinc.com), which has a Google Page Rank of 4, has much more impact than a link from a less prominent website.  In other words, a link from our website is approximately four times more powerful than a link from a website that has a Google Page Rank of 1.  It's not exactly this simple, but it's a way to think about the impact of links from other sites.     

It's critical to make sure your content is rich and optimized.  But if you really want to get ranked in the top 5 for search terms that have good frequency, you better charge up your link building activities.