Archive for the ‘Website Development’ Category
by Erin Ferree
Source: elf design
Now that you’ve designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it’s important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information. Just like regular maintenance on your car, you have to make changes on your website every few months to make sure that things run smoothly.
If you update the content on your website on a regular basis, potential clients will be drawn back to your site to find out “what’s new”. The search engines pay visits to websites in their queue regularly. The catch is that you’ll stay in the queue only if you update your site regularly. If the search engines visit your site several times in a row, and don’t find anything new, they may decide not to come back—which can be a blow to your search engine rankings.
So, when is it appropriate to update your website? You don’t want to waste time and money nitpicking at your site if you don’t have updates of real value to add. You should update your site if you’ve:
- Grown your skills. Have you gotten a new accreditation? New licensing? Improved your skills? Any change in your skill set is a great reason to update your website—and your potential clients—with your new capabilities.
- Expanded your products or services. Do you have a new offering? Add it to your website and start making new sales in that area.
- Completed a successful project. If you’ve just finished a project, include it on your website. Create an online portfolio, add a case study—build a section on your website to use as a place to show the world your success.
- Gotten more testimonials, or added to your client list. Including more feedback on your offering helps to build your credibility. Be sure to get a testimonial from each of your successful client projects. Updating your testimonials regularly will also show clients who have visited your site a few times that your offerings are “up to snuff”.
- Written an article. Writing articles is a great way to keep your website up-to-date and to put more content on your site. Search engines love content-rich sites, and visitors will love to see the new information. So, if you write articles to educate your clients and promote your business, be sure to place them on your website as well. They’re likely to be full of keywords related to your area of specialty, which will help your ranking in the search engines.
- Press releases. You should post all press releases and other information you publish about your company to your website. You never know who may be visiting, and you may get written up for your accomplishments.
- Changes in your business. Have you hired someone? Changed your business structure, and you’re now required to notify the public of that? If so, you should probably review your website and evaluate how you can add that information.
- Yearly check-ups. You should do a basic check on your site at least once a year, to make sure that the content is current. Some things to check on include:
- Your copyright statements should be updated yearly
- Test and validate your links, to ensure that they still work
- Your time references should be changed. If your “About” page says how many years you’ve been in business, this is the time to change that!
- Your pricing and offerings—do you have new products or services? Have your prices increased over the past year?
Spotlight any major updates on your home page as well, so that people will learn of those updates as soon as they enter your site. The search engines will also discover the new update as soon as they enter your home page if you leave a bit of information, with a link to the full story, on the home page. That will act as a breadcrumb for the engine to follow—the engines will follow your link to learn more about it.
Any of these reasons, and dozens of others, are great reasons to make changes to your site. If you make keeping your website current a priority, it will pay off with better search engine rankings and increased sales and leads through your website.
Once you’ve decided to make your changes, the next choice is how to go about doing that. There are two steps involved in maintaining your site:
- First, decide whether you prefer to edit your content on paper or online.This can be done in a couple of ways. You can start by printing the pages that have outdated information and then updating that information on paper first. Or, you can copy and paste the outdated content from your website into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word and then edit that file on your computer.
- After you have updated your text content you can choose either to make the changes yourself or to hire a web designer to make the changes. There are several tools that you can use to make changes to your site yourself. We recommend an easy-to-use tool called Macromedia Contribute. It’s fairly inexpensive, its simple to set up and learn, and it allows you to back up to older versions of your site if you make mistakes.We suggest that you use this tool to make only simple text changes. More complicated changes—for example, to the overall design or navigation—are more difficult to make, and having a professional make those changes will save you energy and frustration.
If you are comfortable with a more complicated software program, then we recommend a professional-grade tool such as Dreamweaver. With a better software package, you’ll be able to make some of the more complicated changes yourself.
If you don’t have the time, patience, or know-how to make website updates yourself, then we recommend hiring a web designer. For tips on hiring a designer, see our November 2005 article:—“13 Tips for Finding a Graphic Designer.”.
By building more—and more current—information into your website, you will also begin to build trust with your potential clients, since they will have a snapshot of what’s currently happening in your business and available to them. Your website can go a long way towards making sure that your online prospects know, like, and trust you—which can lead to more sales from your website.
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.
by Erin Ferree
Source: elf design
At first glance the title of this article sounds obvious — that your website would look like all your other marketing materials. Of course that’s just something that would have to happen, right? But I run into more and more entrepreneurs who want to break this rule. Creating a website that looks significantly different from all of your other marketing materials just tends to be a bad idea. I’m going to review the most common reasons I hear for breaking this cardinal rule. Then I’ll tell you exactly why doing so would hurt your brand rather than help it.
The 4 reasons that I hear most often from entrepreneurs are:
- The web allows you to use as many colors as you want, without paying extra. Many forms of printing still charge per color of ink used and using more than 2 or 3 colors can get very expensive for small businesses. However the web allows you to use all the colors that you want, for free!Many entrepreneurs get very excited about this. They use every color they can think of throughout the site. And sometimes, they choose not to use the 2 or 3 colors that they’ve used in their print materials because they’re sick of them. This results in a website that doesn’t look anything like their other designed materials. This creates a “disconnect” for clients who come to your site from a reference of another piece. For example imagine someone’s looking at your business card designed in black and red. Then they go to your website where there’s some black and red, but also bright blue, gold, green and a touch of purple. They may think that the website belongs to a different company! It makes your visitor wonder if they’re in the right place. And that can make you lose their trust.A better way to use color online is to use the wider palette of colors available as secondary colors. If your printed materials are mostly blue and gold, that doesn’t mean that you have to use only blue and gold in your website — but they should be the main colors used. Adding in highlights of khaki or green can look very nice and add more visual interest to your website. But if you choose green to be your main color for your website, it will be confusing.Also, make sure that the extra colors you choose fit in with your brand. Make sure they communicate the messages you want to send out about your business. In other words, don’t choose more colors just because you can. Make sure that there’s a solid design reason and the psychology behind the colors you’re adding to your palette makes sense.Another way to add more color online is full-color photography. Stock photography is quite cheap and accessible to even the smallest businesses and can add a lot of pep and pizzazz to your tired color palette.
- Many entrepreneurs get bored with their designs, and use the web as an excuse to “mix it up”. If you’ve had your materials designed for a while, it’s not uncommon for you to be bored with them. No matter how innovative the design or how excited you were about it when it was created, this can happen. This boredom comes because you see your own marketing materials almost every day. Whether it comes from printing letters on your letterhead, handing out your cards at a networking event, looking at proposals with your brand on them, walking into your office and seeing your logo on the same old sign every day, or giving presentations off of your PowerPoint template — you see the same thing over and over. And it’s natural.But I can almost guarantee you that unless you’ve been in business a very long time or you’ve been harassing your clients with constant marketing mailings, you’re the only one who’s bored of it.Deciding to take a different design direction on your website is bad for your brand. It is bad because you need your site to be instantly recognizable as yours. Web surfers have notoriously short attention spans — if they click to your site, and it doesn’t look right, they’ll be off and away to another site in the blink of an eye. They won’t stick around to read your copy, look at your logo, or to spend the time to figure out whether they are, in fact, in the right place.
- Some entrepreneurs don’t have files of their logo! If you designed your materials a long time ago, and only got printed materials as a deliverable, this is certainly a valid problem. Your designer may also have gone out of business or changed their contact information. Or maybe you can’t remember their name or number because it was so long ago!I’ve seen many entrepreneurs to create a different logo or masthead for their websites because they don’t have the file for their logo close at hand.If you still know who your designer is, I recommend contacting them and asking for a complete set of digital files of your logo. There’s actually quite a bit of information you should get from your designer to ensure that all of the materials you design in the future are consistent with one another. I’ve written an article about that here:http://www.elf-design.com/article-Plan-Ahead-Designer.html
It’s a better solution and better for your brand, to look up your designer (even if it takes a bit of searching), or to have another designer re-create your logo as a digital vector artwork file, and to use that on your website.
- Some entrepreneurs think that websites must have a certain type of design element to look up-to-date and modern. It’s true that your site does have to look clean, professional and well-designed. But it’s not true that your website has to have one particular type of design to look current. Your site doesn’t have to have textures, rounded corners, drop shadows, 3-dimensional styling or animated motion effects. Only use those effects if they reinforce and communicate your Brand Definition to your audience and are a part of your Visual Vocabulary.Just using these elements because it’s cool and “of-the-moment” isn’t something that I recommend. It will dilute your brand and move your website away from the rest of your Visual Vocabulary.
If you’re thinking of creating a website that looks drastically different from your other designed materials for any of these reasons, consider the consequences before moving ahead with a different design. It’s often more valuable to have a matching website that extends and reinforces your brand than to create a design that looks too different.
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.
by Erin Ferree
Source: elf design
It’s recess time on the elementary school playground. A group of third graders is playing kick ball in teams on the grass. Suddenly, there’s a big argument over whether the last point goes to the girls’ team or the boys’ team.
The argument rages on for what seems like forever — almost a whole minute of precious recess time has been wasted! In third grade, wasting recess is a crime! And it must be stopped before time runs out.
One of the girls realizes, stops arguing, looks around and declares, “Do-over”. The boys accept this proposal, the last play is forgotten, and the game starts again.
The slate is wiped clean, but the play has to be repeated
When you were young, do-overs were an easy way to resolve an argument, fix unfairness or quickly change history.
Why wouldn’t you want to be able to do this with your business website? Unlike the playground game, designing a website takes a lot of time, work and money — it’s just not a task that you’re going to want to start over from scratch again!
And, once you’ve launched one website, it’s harder to get a do-over from your prospects and clients than it is to get the other team to agree to one in elementary school.
Avoiding a do-over sometimes leads to project paralysis
At this point, a lot of entrepreneurs get scared — they don’t want to create a do-over, but they don’t know where to start down the right path. So, they put their project off, and instead stress out about getting everything ready. Plus, avoiding starting means they won’t make any mistakes. That works itself up into procrastination and full-scale project paralysis — and the website project winds up never getting completed.
The reason that people get paralyzed is because they don’t know how to plan and create a website in a way that minimizes the chance that they’ll have to re-do it. But, there are a few ways to ensure that your site will be as permanent as possible, without driving yourself crazy with all the considerations.
Five Steps to Creating a Site That Will Stick
1. Decide what you want your website to do for your business. A website should be more than just something you have to create for your business. What’s your site’s purpose? What are its jobs? Who will be coming to the site? What do you most want them to do once they get there? What do your visitors most want to know?
If you create the site with the end goal in mind, then your site will be more successful. This is because you can create every piece of the site to encourage the viewer to take a certain path through the site or a particular action. Planning the experience that a visitor will have on your site can help get more visitors to meet your goal on the site.
2. The function of your website will determine the types of content you’ll need. Look at the job you want your site to perform, and who the site is for. That will start to give you hints about the types of content you should include on it.
In planning your basic content, consider the pages you’ll need to include on the site. Also think about any subscribe forms, shopping carts, audio, etc. that would help you communicate with your target audience. Lastly, think about which of these pieces you need immediately and which you can add in later. This will help ensure your website project won’t take forever to complete.
3. Don’t get hung up on writing the text. The next step is to gather your samples and write your text for the website. A lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this phase of the project. This is because they’re not comfortable writing, they don’t have the time to write their text, or they find that it takes a while to get the testimonials they need.
This is the one part of your site that’s easy to revise later on — so don’t stress out about getting the text “just perfect” — just get the text put together and then plan on revising it shortly after the site is launched.
4. Design the site to look timeless. There’s no way to know what design trends are coming next, and what effects would make your site look like it was designed in a particular year. Sites full of cutting-edge effects and technology this year may look passé next year.
How do you design a site to look timeless? If you create your design based on your own logo and Visual Vocabulary and keep the design generally clean, the likelihood that it will look dated is lessened. Stick close to your own brand designs and you’ll have a website that you can keep for the long haul.
5. Code the site cleanly. In order to make sure that your site will work across multiple browsers and systems and will work on future versions of those browsers, make sure that your code is clean. To maximize your search engine optimization results, you’ll want to code the site in HTML instead of in Flash so that Google and the other engines will be able to read it. Coding in HTML also makes your site easier to update in the future — you’ll want to add to your site’s text and make edits to what’s already there.
Recreating your website isn’t as easy as a do-over on the playground. By following the 5 steps here, you’ll create a website that will serve your business well for a long while. And you’ll be able to avoid having to start the site all over again!
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.