Small Business Websites: Often The First View Into Your Business
April 14, 2009
Living and working on Hilton Head island, it always strikes me how many businesses in the Travel and Tourism Industry either don’t have a website or have a dated or poorly built website. I look around Hilton Head and Savannah and see these sites everywhere, including Hilton Head’s own site. I think it must be a fear factor in undertaking the project. Just the idea of being online scares these businesses so they ignore it. Either that or they don’t see the value in an effective web presence. But it is very important.
Tourists are not leaving their computers at home anymore and when they come one vacation they use the computers to make decisions about where they are going to spend money. The Internet allows visitors to quickly compare charter boats, jet skis, or restaurants online. It is imperative that these businesses provide decent pictures, the benefits of their service, rates and directions or they will lose business to companies that do have that on their website.
It isn’t neccassary to have the greatset site ever with super flash movies and music and video (although video used properly can be VERY effective). We need to take brochures and marketing materials and put them online. For example, I recently completed a site for a Hilton Head Island Mechanic, Island Motors. This site is not fancy, and doesn’t even have an email form on it. The owner doesn’t have time for that time of thing and doesn’t want to let emails sit and get stale. But, when a tourist is in Town and there car is overheating, when they don’t go to the yellow pages, or even if they do, his site is going to let people know what he does and where he is. This online brochure is not expensive, as a matter of fact at raise Interactive we usually charge around $600 for a site like this, not thousands, and we keep them online for $15/month. Its effective and it works. I have another client, a Hilton Head Island Vacation Home, who needed an attractive web prescence to drive traffic to through such sites as VRBO and Craigslist. Again, simple and easy, it gets 100s of hits a day and its rare that a day goes by without the contact form filled out.
So we encourage people, if youb have questions, fill out our form. We are happy to work with you to build your business online. We don’t double talk or use crazy buzzwords, we just build effective websites.
How we build websites
February 22, 2009
When starting Raise Interactive we were posed with a dilemma, how could we be a full service internet marketing agency for small businesses if we couldn’t build affordable websites for our clients. For most of our customers the web site is the first thing we need to address by building a site or making changes to a current site. If it is a large project we work with several professional website designers like Webheads, Inc. that we know and trust. But what about the smaller client, just getting started online who needs an attractive, functioning site but doesn’t need bells and whistles and has a limited budget.
In these cases we use the WordPress platform to build business websites. Originally started as blogging software it allows us to not only build websites but it is a built in Content Management System, allowing clients or Raise Interactive to easily update the site. It is a fantastic program that is also Open Source, allowing people to use the platform for free. It encourages a number of independent developers to make plugins and tools that they distribute, often for free.
On this platform we utilize a number of WordPress Themes from iThemes.com. We experimented with several free themes or templates and they just don’t do the job. The iThemes themes are very flexible and customizable, they look great and they have been very stable. They allow us to cut hours of time off a website design which significantly lowers the price for our clients. And to give you an idea, this site was built using the Architect Theme from iThemes.
This process allows us to build customizable, great looking, fully functioning sites for our clients that don’t cost an arm and a leg. And when we do run into a larger job we still have the resources of our network of trusted developers.
Mistakes Small Businesses Make With Websites:
February 17, 2009
There a lot of bad websites on the web. We are convinced that a bad website is worse than no website at all because it is often the first impression of your business and if it looks cheap or doesn’t work that is what customers will associate with your business. We understand that small businesses don’t have marketing departments, or the time to research best practices, and best practices can often be very different for large and small companies; so mistakes get made.
We went through some recent sites that have come to our attention and made a list of some pitfalls that small businesses should avoid when designing and building a website.
1. Make a plan: I can’t tell you how many companies, both large and small seem to have a website because they think they need one. The website has some basic information, and maybe some pictures, but no real information and no sense of how people should go through it. Small businesses need to have a plan before a site ever gets launched.
The first step is deciding what the site is for. This step is often overlooked. Is it an information sharing portal for your business holding store hours and contact information? That is a very basic site and the focus should be on making sure it looks its best and gives the feel of the company it represents. If the business wants to sell online they will need to decide how much of their product they want to sell online, how the inventory will be managed, and how the orders will come in.
Business owners need to think about how they want visitors to react to their sites and plan accordingly. You might design some pages as landing pages and others as pages that are design to be the second or third page viewed.
It also helps to completely design the site architecture, write out all the content on the site, and pick any pictures that are going to be on the site. While it doesn’t have to be set in stone, if all the content is ready before the first piece of code is written it will make the web site go up quicker and be more effective in the long term.
2. Avoid heavy use of flash, sound effects and other unnecessary bells and whistles: We know many designers who build only in Adobe Flash, and many do great work, however they are doing a serious disservice to 90% of their clients. To search engine spiders and bots Flash is viewed as an image, which makes an all Flash page basically invisible to the search engines. This makes it very difficult to achieve solid organic rankings in the Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other engines. Through a strong link building campaign it is possible but it is a major handicap and in any competitive space it will be a real hindrance.
There are other sites that don’t use flash but are completely image based. These sites have the same problem as Flash sites, they are invisible to the the engines. A good rule of thumb is if you can’t highlight, copy and paste the text than the search engines can’t see it.
A personal pet peeve of mine is websites that talk, play music or sound when you first arrive without giving you a choice. There is a place for video on your site and those people who walk out and talk to customers, but if you surprise people with sound many will quickly back out or close their browsers. Also, many prospects search from work computers and don’t want loud a video letting their co-workers know what sites they are viewing. ESPN is a major offender of this and that is one of the major reasons I get most of my sports news from CNNSi. The proper way to use video on your site is to start the video running with the mute on and a large button or slider to turn the volume on. The customer can make the decision then if they want to hear the sound or not.
3. Don’t be overly ambitious: We see this a lot from small businesses but I think it is often the fault of the web designers. Your site does not have to do everything imaginable, especially if it is the first site going up for a small business. The site needs to portray the image and brand of the business and follow the plan that was set at the beginning. It probably does not need customer forums, the ability to upload video, web 2.0 interactivity or any other buzz word. Every one of those bells and whistles probably won’t be used and they can also break, making your site look bad. Focus on the plan and how you want visitors to react to your site.
We have also seen more and more small businesses with advertising on their site. This is generally a bad idea for most small businesses. We have worked so hard to get people to your site, why do you want to lead them off of it?
4. Too little content: Many sites have far too little content for what they are trying to accomplish. We want clean sites that are not just long paragraph after long paragraph, but if handled correctly most websites could be much more content rich. Users can click through to a new page, read an excerpt and decide to read more, or scan bullet points and then scroll down to read the whole article. Let the user select how in-depth they want to get with your site, it will give your site more authority, keywords and build more trust with your customers.
5. Track the results: This is absolutely essential and something that small businesses do far too little of. For a business website it is imperative to constantly track traffic to your site and see how visitors are reacting. If 90% of the traffic that hits your home page leaves immediately, we probably have a problem. You can also track paths and make sure visitors are reacting in the manner that you planned. If not, make changes. The tools are there, they just need to be used.
So those are 5 rules of mistakes that small businesses make when building a new website. If you have questions or would like more information about small business web design, just drop us a line. We are happy to run a free analysis on any site.
5 Tips For Small Businesses Considering a New Website
February 2, 2009
Small business web design is a different breed from enterprise level, or corporate web design, but most design companies do not make a differentiation. Needs are different, budgets are different and goals are different. We thought we would share a list of steps we take when we start a project and landmines to avoid.
1. Decide what you want the site to do:
Too many websites decide they need a site before they decide why. One of the first things we do when we talk to a prospective client is ask them what they want the site to do. Is it an online brochure? Are you trying to sell things online? Are you trying to generate leads? These are three completely different sites.
2. Do you need a custom site or does a platform make sense:
There are many good reasons for businesses to build a website completely from scratch, however this can be cost prohibitive for many small businesses. Depending on your needs it may make more sense to build on a platform, such as WordPress, that allows you to build and edit the site in a very easy, inexpensive way. And with all the widgets and plugins out there these sites can be pretty powerful. Our company site is built on the WordPress platform and it works for us.
3. Don’t overuse Flash or other image based platforms:
Flash is a great program, however text in images is basically invisible to Search Engines,which will hamper any type of an optimization campaign. Get text out of images on your page. A good rule of thumb is that if you can copy and paste the the text on your screen the Search Engines can crawl and index the information.
4. Decide all pages and write the content before you start:
Before you start building a site write the full site design including all the pages and sub pages. Think about how you want the consumer to interact with your page and how you want visitors to travel through your site. Is a blog appropriate? They are great for Search Engine Campaigns, but if you don’t update them they make your business look lazy or closed. Write all the content for the pages before you start, it makes the process easier and quicker. You can always change it later.
5. Once you build test everything and test often:
Once your site is online test everything. Test all the links, your contact form, and reproof the pages. Things can break. Sometimes a “small” change you think made can have cascading effects over the page. Keep an eye on everything on the site, because a broken site can reflect poorly on your business.
Once your site is up and working, consider different marketing techniques. Consider a Pay Per Click Campaign or a link building strategy. Start a campaign to collect email addresses. Keep your blog up to date, and talk to your customers. Ask them what they think, how the site works for them, and watch your results. Install an Analytics program like Google Analytics to keep track of how visitors interact with the site and check them often. Make changes based on the results. While you don’t want to make wholesale changes often, make small fixes and tweaks. Remember, your website is often the first look visitors get at your business, and you don’t often get a second chance at a first impression.