Does Your Website Fit?

Business website planning when done well yields results. Have you spent time wisely?

At start-up, you allocate funds to equip your office, purchase computers and software to manage your business. However, did you allocate business website planning time and funds to get the website your business needs to attract the right customers and present your brand correctly?

One Size Does NOT Fit All

Websites are not “one-size fits all” solutions. To get one that is tailored precisely for your business needs, you must know:

Who your primary customers are
What they search for on the Internet
How your products and services fulfill their needs and wants
What is the primary purpose of your website
What is the primary action your site’s visitors should take
Who is going to manage your website and keep it updated
How will you track success or quantify conversions
How will you market your website

These insights help you develop buyer personas for each potential customer visiting your website—and they may be different than other buyer personas you’ve developed for face to face sales. Buyer personas in turn help your web design and development firm to create the site that will support your business goals.

Of course, you know your business goals are not the same as your competitors. And you know your brand must have a different selling proposition—one which positions your company distinctively when compared to your competition.

Tailored for Your Business

We often see people with great ideas and stellar business concepts essentially shutting the door to potential opportunity when they decide that their website can be created by their friend’s teenage son or by using cheap web site development templates or online site building tools.

They make the mistake of buying “off the rack” and getting a template or design that was made to fit just about anybody. What often happens after purchasing off the rack? They spend their precious dollars having a web developer reverse engineer the template to fit their business brand and goals.

Isn’t it much more efficient to build what is best going to suit your business? This is a no-waste strategy. Get exactly the right solution for exactly your goals.

Don’t expect that you can figure this out in an afternoon, or a day or even a week. You will need to do some homework. Know how your competitors’ sites function. You must look at lots of websites—within and without your industry. Evaluate what works as you use a site and what frustrates you. Try, if you can, to think like a customer, not as the business. Analyze what makes you leave a site or what makes you stay. And most importantly, what makes you take a particular action? All these insights will clarify for you and your web developer how to design and implement the site your firm needs which will fit the needs of your customers. Remember, the customer is the ultimate user, not you. It is her you must satisfy.

Your website is your twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five overview of your firm, lead generator and answer provider—and if you offer e-commerce, your always-open online store.

And if you already have a website for your business does it gain you leads? Does it offer all the right information to your customers? Have you ever asked your customers what they like best about your site or like least? Do you track how successful it is? If you cannot answer these questions definitively, then you may need to invest the time and take a fresh look at your site. And you may need to give it a boost or even a redesign so it works. After all, if your site doesn’t work for you what good is it?

Start With the End In Mind

How can you get started planning your website? We provide this planning questionnaire to our customers. Use it. Doing so will help you spend wisely, and will yield you a custom tailored website that fits your business, and which helps you get the right kind of leads to grow your business.

Photo by pina messina on Unsplash

Holly Herrick’s Website Refresh Launched

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Author launches new, fresh site

Over the last four years we’ve had the privilege of working with Charleston cookbook author, food writer and blogger Holly Herrick.

Holly has been extremely busy over the last years authoring a number of new cookbooks. In the past several months, she’s focused much of her writing on exploring Charleston with insider insights and things to see and do in our town.

Responsive site focuses on content

To support her expanded writings, Holly wanted a more contemporary, responsive site that was as fresh as her inventive recipes. Working in conjunction with Holly, we reviewed what she liked and didn’t like in websites, discussed her hopes for the new site and got busy designing a new look and feel, using her brand identity previously created by Jay Fletcher.

The new site provides a magazine format home page which allows users to jump into the site’s content based on their interests. It also updates Holly’s brand with a new sassy tagline and approach.

We thank Holly for allowing us to support her on her professional journey. We’re looking forward to more tasty adventures as Holly leads us on new explorations of Charleston and the Lowcountry.

If you would like to see your website updated with a new, responsive theme, give us a call. You’ll find our facelifts are far less uncomfortable than those from a plastic surgeon and a whole lot more fun!

Avoid Writing “Click Here” When Authoring Your Website or Marketing Email Content

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Hyperlink styles help website visitors find their way

Many years ago when the World Wide Web came into popular use there were lots of people who did not understand what a hyperlink looked like. Nor, did they understand that a hyperlink was a shortcut to view other content or read relevant information related to the topic at hand.

It took some time before users of this new World Wide Web understood that text which was underlined or of a different color could take them to another place on the web.

You may know this already, but it bears restating: According to W3Schools, there are four states of a hyperlink. They are:

a normal, unvisited link
a link the user has visited
a link when the user mouses over it
a link the moment it is clicked

If your web site developer has done their job properly there will be a visual indication of a hyperlink’s presence within your content. The text may be bold and of a different color or it may be underlined and of a different color and it may change color when you hover over it with a mouse or cursor.

So here we are today with many more people understanding how to use the Web. Yet we still see content authors writing text which reads, “Click here to read our calendar.” or “Click here to visit our web site.”

These incorrect uses of anachronistic phrases which date to the beginning of the World Wide Web need to die.

Instead of using those dated phrases, try writing your content to include text which reads, “View all dates on our calendar,” or “View our website,” or the now universally understood “Read more.”

Writing hyperlinks to help your SEO

If you are a optimizing your website to be found for critical search terms and phrases, creating hyperlinks or cross-site links on words which direct your visitors to relevant information is critical to your site’s success in search results.

The optimal way to direct a web site visitor is to write, “view our selection of summer sandals.” Or even better yet, “View our strappy, stylish summer sandals.” If you write, “Click to view our products.” you get no positive boost from that hyperlink’s presence in your content.

By writing descriptive phrases which contain an invitation to take an action, you help your web site visitor and you may boost your presence in search engine results.