BuyDomains Newsletter
April 2007
1. Define the Goals of Your Site — Before You Start Designing
Before you engage a website design firm, you should take the time to outline the goals you have for your site.
Are you an e-tailer whose goal is to sell across three lines of business? Are you a professional services firm looking to generate inquiries and build your marketing database through whitepaper downloads? Or are you an entertainment site primarily seeking return visitors in order to generate pay-per-click advertising revenues?
Be sure to outline the goals for your site clearly, so that the designer knows what is, and isn't, important to you as a business owner.
Be realistic — you cannot be successful if you have ten goals for your home page — the impact will be lost and visitors will not engage.
2. Know Your Audience
It may seem an obvious question, but who are you trying to attract to your site?
Effective websites are designed to meet the needs of the visitor; if you don't have a good idea of who your typical visitor is/might be, you have a real challenge ahead of you.
If you are a new business, do research on your industry and see who your competitors are selling to; if you are an established business and are just going online, ask your customers for feedback on their preferences.
3. Ensure that Your Site has Clean, Intuitive Architecture
You may not start with a site containing hundreds of pages of content,in fact and you may never develop a site with more than 20 pages. But, when you are planning your site, think about how you want your website to work five years from now.
Make sure that you have set up a framework that will allow you to achieve that five year goal.
When you build a house, you make the doors wide enough to accommodate furniture; building a site with an architecture that allows you to "furnish it" properly is a must.
What does this mean in a practical sense? Develop a hierarchy for product pages. For example, if you are a food business, you might want to organize your product pages into folders by food group, or by country (i.e., desserts or Italian specialties). If you are a professional services firm, you may want to have all of your whitepapers in a master folder ("content") with sub-folders based on content ("patent law" or "incorporation"). Displaying related content and cross-linking within your site will make for a richer user experience.
4. Make the Call to Action CLEAR and COMPELLING
Are you developing an e-commerce site? If you want people to buy your products, you need to make sure that they: 1) can select products and services and get them into the shopping cart easily, 2) that they can access/view their shopping cart at any point during their visit, and 3) that they have a clear path to a simple and quick checkout process once they are ready to give you their money.
In order to facilitate these actions, your web designer needs to create a user-friendly interface with visible "buying cues", a cart which allows users to make modifications (adjust quantities, add/subtract items) and one which lets them know where they are in the checkout process.
5. Make Your Site SEO Friendly
If you have purchased the right SEO-friendly domain name(s), a skilled designer can help to create a page with content and metadata which will help to earn you ranking on your key terms in the major search engines.
Want to learn more about key aspects of web design and usability? Here are some helpful sites:
Are you ready to design your site?
Want to take advantage of a special website design offer from Captivate Designs — our world-class partner? Through the end of April, save $79 and get a custom website for the price of a pre-made site.
Learn more about website design
What is viral marketing, and how can it help your business?
Viral marketing is, essentially, marketing which builds momentum based on user response. Often it is driven by word-of-mouth, or grounded in existing social networks.
Even in today's online world, referral-based marketing is one of the most effective means of generating leads and revenue.
So, the challenge for the small business owner is how to create viral marketing on a shoestring?
Here are a few techniques to explore for your site:
- Allow user-generated content and let the person submitting send notifications to friends and family advising them to come read the material — on your site! Perhaps they can share a success story about how your products improved their business, or how they used your products creatively (i.e. how did your software help a customer grow their business 10% in six months, or how did a customer use your Italian gourmet products as part of a holiday celebration)
- Create a feature which your customers will want to pass on (and employ an email or web-based service which facilitates forwarding) such as a financial tip of the month, or a seasonal recipe.
- Submit your content to sites like work.com so that your site will get exposure. And readers may pass your message along building your audience. If you are in a specialized, vertical industry you may be able to submit content to a trade association website or magazine.
- Feature tools which have ongoing usefulness, such as budget calculators, which customers will point their friends to over time.
- Provide "Friends and Family" discount coupons which your customers can pass on to others. Your products gain instant credibility by dint of the referrer's relationship to the person receiving the email, and you have not invested much in the way of customer acquisition costs beyond the offered discount.
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In 2007 nearly half of all marketers will advertise on social networking venues, up from 38% in 2006*.
Are there social networks where your target audience is already aggregated? Are these venues accessible to you as an advertiser? How do you evaluate these advertising opportunities?
"Old fashioned" social networking venues include professional, neighborhood or parent association web sites. While many of these do not accept advertising per se, they may be open to listing you as a sponsor or posting a special discount offer from your firm which is available to members only.
Research on social networking indicates that many businesses start exploring by putting up free "profile pages" on venues such as MySpace — and move on from there if they get good response.
According to the January 2007 iProspect Social Networking Behavior Study: "...one out of three Internet users is already taking advantage of a site containing user-generated content to help make a decision to buy, or not to buy something. In the end, the power of social communication could help to create the most effective advertising platform available. At the very least, smart business owners are going to learn more about the phenomenon!
*Research cited in ClickZ article, March 2007
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