When I was young, I always got a chuckle because my mom kept a yellow pages in the trunk of her car. This was long before the Internet and smart phones. Her reasoning was that she would have a way to find a business while she was away from home. Yes, the yellow pages were indispensable back then. You may have even had the same reaction as Nathan Johnson did in “The Jerk” as shown in the movie clip below.
The clip ends with “I’m in print, things are going to start happening to me now!” OK, that is from a 1979 movie and it is certainly exaggerated. When you get a new phone book now, do you even open it? When was the last time you used it to find a company to help you?
Most people now use the Internet to find a company to solve the current issue. Often the search is done on a smartphone which means that keeping a phone book in your trunk is no longer needed. But if someone tries to find your company on the Internet, are they going to find you? If you are found, what will they find?
Now let’s talk about the money that businesses once budgeted for ads in the phone book. In talking to a printer in the Phoenix area, their quarter page ad cost them around $900 per month or $10,800 per year. When the phone book was no longer delivering customers to their shop, they had that money already budgeted for marketing.
Obviously a great replacement for an ad is a great Web site. It can deliver far more information than you could fit into a static ad. While building a site does have an upfront cost, the monthly cost to keep the content fresh doesn’t have to be expensive. In the case of the printer, it is less than $200 per month.
While the Web site is great, it is important to get people to the site. The printer runs ads on Google, Facebook and Yelp on a regular basis to bring potential customers to the Web site. Yes, that advertising costs money. I’m going to guess they spend around $500 each month for online advertising. Often I’m asked for more ways they can advertise their business.
Those of you who have had a business for many years will certainly understand the money you once budgeted for an ad in the phone book. Replacing that expense with online marketing expenses can give you wider exposure and still be a smaller investment. If you started a business more recently, it is still important that you allocate money (and time) each month to promoting your business.
Do you have a Web site? If not, you really should consider investing in even a very basic site. When was the last time your site got any significant updates? If it was more than a couple of years ago, you really need to look at updating your site to work with today’s devices. Now determine a budget to invest in a new or updated Web site. It doesn’t have to be a large number. That investment can pay off when more customers find your business.
Once the site is all set, make sure you have a good presence on at least a couple of social media platforms. Facebook is important for most all businesses. The second or third choice can vary based on your business. Also consider a monthly budget to promote your business online. Once again, it doesn’t have to be a big number if you choose the right platforms.
Need some help with your Web site, social media platforms and online promotion? We’d love to help you. Just give us basic information about how we can help, and we’ll use our online marketing talents for your business. Yes, you may have guessed it, this blog post is one way that we promote our business online.
When I think back to my days in middle school, I realize how many friends I made that are still in my life years later. Today we’re going to talk about one of those friends. We went in different directions when it came time to go to college. After college, we also went in different directions. While I’m designing Web sites from offices in Arizona and Mexico, he is designing amazing outdoor spaces in California, Mexico and beyond.
Throughout his career, he worked his way up to a senior level position in a firm. I certainly suggested a few times that he consider starting his own firm. He did exactly that almost a year ago. Then the next step was putting together a Web site for the new firm and it has now launched.
We had a lot of discussions about what to include on the site and the best way to present it. One conversation I have with many clients is the importance of a site on a phone. That’s always a bit more challenging when the client is somewhat who never surfs the Web on their own phone. Yet as we worked on the site, Bill truly understood the importance and always made sure to look on his own phone.
As a landscape designer, it was important to show off his designs. This also led to a challenge since many projects take a long time to go from the design phase to completion. Thus there were a number of designs to show which were still in the build phase. In his overall portfolio, the projects are all shown.
There is also a separate portfolio for projects he designed at previous firms, including some very large resorts in the Caribbean and Mexico. Each of the individual projects from the portfolios also have a dedicated page where project details and photos can be shown.
Rarely have a met a Web client that wanted me to spend more time on their site than necessary or to bill them for more hours than needed. Typically they wanted the least expensive site possible. I am happy to work with clients to achieve this goal, but it has the best results if the clients are able to provide all of the information needed.
While each project is different, some tasks are true of most every site. The more the client contributes, the less time I will spend on the project. In many cases, only the client can provide the needed content. Below is a list of some of the most important elements.
Pages and Navigation
I guess I assume you have visited some other Web sites. Most likely hundreds of them. As you visit other sites, you see the individual pages on those sites. Make a list of pages you’ll want on your site. For example: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Our Services. Name them whatever you want, just make a list. You might have a list with only 3-4, you may have a list with hundreds. If I don’t know what pages you want, it is really hard for me to build them.
Once you have the list of pages, I need to know what will go on those pages. You know your business much better than I do. Even if you aren’t a writer, any text you can create is very helpful. I can clean up what you provide, but I can’t write about something if I don’t know anything about it.
Once upon a time a client asked me to write a bio for each of the ten employees on their staff. I had never met nine of them. Do you see why it would be difficult for me to write about them if all I knew was their name? In that situation, ask each staff member to write two sentences about themselves. We can edit the bio, but it isn’t something I can write.
By listing page names and the text content of the pages in an electronic file, you save me a lot of typing. Do you really want to pay my hourly fee to have me be a typist? Yes, you might grumble that I’m asking you to do it, but I’m trying to help you save money while also getting a better Web site.
Photos and Graphics
Just like I often need your help with the text on pages, I also need your help with photos and graphics. Yes, I can sometimes take photos for you. Once again, that means you will be paying for my time setting up the photo, shooting it, editing it and then putting it on the site. Maybe you already have good photos. Why reinvent the wheel?
No, the incredibly low resolution photo can’t be used. It is awful. Computers can do wonderful things, but they can’t work magic on awful photos. When you provide good original photos, I can improve them and they will look great on your site. Plus, I can do it quickly to keep your bill as low as possible.
The same is true of other graphics. Sure we could purchase stock artwork. Yes I have a lot of skills for creating and editing graphics. But all of that takes time and time is money. If you can provide me more artwork, I can save you money.
One of the most important graphics is your logo. I need it in a vector format. No, that crummy JPG on your current Web site isn’t a good answer. Could I rebuilt it? Sure, but it could take me a few hours. Please spend just a few more minutes looking for the best version you can find. This helps me put the best version of your company on the Web site and also saves money.
Sample Sites
When you’ve surfed the Web, you have probably seen some sites that you like. Maybe not even the whole site, but elements of the site caught your eye. Give me a list of some of your favorites and tell me why you like it.
Just as you have your favorites, you probably can also name a few sites you think are bad. I want that list as well so I can avoid the things you don’t like.
I know this may sound like a lot of work. If you want to raise your budget, I’m happy to do more and bill you for it. But if you want me to keep to a very tight budget, I need your help providing as much as the content as possible. Then I can focus on making your site awesome!
Recently we were asked to makeover a site for a company that does custom embroidery. While there were some aspects of the old site that the client wanted improved, some of the requested changes were related to security.
Let’s go through some of the visual changes. The company certainly wants to show off their past projects. On the home page, they had quite a few graphics depicting projects and it was somewhat difficult for them to update what was shown.
Not only was it hard to update, it took up a large amount of space. The graphic above does not show all of the projects. We decided to simplify it by putting the projects into a slider. This took up a lot less space and cycled through all projects. If you hover over any of the projects (as shown below), it tells you the name of the project and a click takes you to a page of project details.
They also have dedicated pages for each type of project. These pages were also difficult to update. Below is the old page showing bags.
While the new page doesn’t look drastically different (see below), it updates automatically as new bag projects are added. Once again, hovering over any of the bags will show the name of the project and clicking on one of them takes you to the details of the project.
Many Web sites included frequently asked questions (FAQs). Unfortunately visitors rarely read them. This site had just such a page, but it was a wall of words that could be easily ignored (see below).
We cleaned it up so that each of the questions was prominently featured (see below). Clicking on a question expands just the answer for that question. This makes it easier for visitors to find just the information they need.
There were numerous other changes made behind the scenes to make the site faster and more secure. Best of all, it will be easier for either Web Design Solutions Unleashed or the client to make future updates. Does your site need a makeover of either looks or functionality? Visit our Contact Us page and let us know how we can help!
A friend called and asked if I could fix a couple of things on his Web site. The first issue was an error message in the sidebar where news should appear. There was also a problem receiving information submitted by the contact form. As I hadn’t built the site, there were some unknowns in first finding the errors and then correcting them.
I gave the site a quick look and noticed that it was not the least bit mobile friendly. This is a big deal as 64% of small businesses have a Web site, but only 33% of them are optimized for mobile viewing. Yet it is the way that the majority of visitors see most sites. There was a great article in The Wall Street Journal recently, The Key to Making a Mobile Site Customers Want, that should be read by anyone with a Web site.
I proposed that I could give the site a quick makeover in about the same amount of time it would take me to diagnose and fix the errors on the site. So that was the direction we took. First, let’s look at the old site and one of the ugly errors.
Above you can see the entire home page from the old design and at right is just the sidebar with the big, ugly error message. The best part about the error message is that it provides the address of the feed that should appear. I tested the feed and it worked perfectly, so clearly there was a coding error.
The original site was not built with WordPress so I first set up a brand new WordPress site and copied all of the content from the old site. As there were only five pages, it didn’t take long to build a replica site. One of the tougher challenges was creating a background with the “binary numbers” on top of tiles.
We could use the old binary graphic as it was only two strips for each edge of the main content area. The new design had to be setup so that it would scale to all screen sizes. It was easy to keep the tiles and I created a new binary overlay so the entire background was seamless and would scale to any size screen.
While it may have been quicker to fix just the two items mentioned, it didn’t take much longer to makeover the whole site. The result is a site that is without the errors of the previous site and it works on all devices. Should any future changes need to be made, they can be easily integrated. Below is a screen shot of the new home page.
When we were contacted about making over the site for a local Christmas festival, it was easy to see things that could be improved. The site had used one of the popular do-it-yourself “Web site builders” which limited the look of the site (shown below).
The first thing we noticed was the large number of menu items across the top of the site. It is simple enough to put them into sub-menus so they aren’t so small and crowded. It also seemed odd to be dominated by colors that aren’t associated with Christmas. Our mission was to rebuild the site using WordPress while giving it a facelift at the same time.
A huge challenge was having a very limited budget and thus very little time to spend on the makeover. So while it is easy for us to see ways the site could be even better, we had to focus on doing everything we could in the limited time allowed by the budget. Below is a section of the home page after the makeover.
This particular event is made up of a series of events with different organizations leading the sub-events. Of course each group feels their portion is the most important part of the overall event and we tried to give them all equal billing on the site. As with many projects, getting photos, text, logos and other content was a challenge.
The best sites, and those that easily come in under budget, are those where clients are very active in providing content for the site. Even pulling photos from the previous site wasn’t a great answer because they were of a low quality. Trying to feature them on the new site showed they were low resolution and less than optimal.
Another heavy focus of any site makeover is to make sure the new site works great on mobile devices. Why? Because around 65% of all visits are coming from mobile devices. If you only view a site on a computer, you aren’t seeing what the majority of visitors will see. In many ways, the new version of this site< looks better on a phone than it does on a computer!
Do you have a site that is overdue for a makeover? Please contact us with an overview of your budget and needs and we’ll get your site looking and performing great!
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