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On May 4th, 2006, Laura Powers spoke to the Peddler's Village
Merchants Association in Lahaska, PA. Her goal was to speak
directly with the shop owners in Peddler's Village on the topic
of having a web site that works. Below are some highlights from
the presentation.
Creating an Effective Web Site
by Laura Powers
My own company, Harvest Graphics, has been in business for 10 years
this year and is a successful Strategic Marketing and Advertising
Company. Most of our clients find us through searching on the web
for various word combinations such as “Doylestown Marketing”
or “Advertising Bucks County”.
This is how the Harvest Graphics web site has helped us grow our
business, through being a marketing tool that works for us, even
while we are sleeping! By attracting customers and presenting our
business to the potential client even before we know who they are,
our web site is a sales force that works for us 24/7.
Increasingly, potential customers will look at your company's online
presence before doing business with you. Your web site is often
your company’s face to the world. Having a good web site that
has a proven track record of generating revenue for your business
can increase the value of your business, by increasing sales.
I will cover three general areas of developing a successful website:
1. Objectives – Building the foundation for
your site
2. Components – What an effective site contains
regarding design, text, and images
And most importantly
3. Getting traffic to your site
1. Objectives – Building the foundation of
your site.
NOT clearly defining the objective for your company’s site
is similar to beginning to build a house without an architectural
plan. You will not even be able to dig the foundation correctly.
In other words, without creating a site plan through developing
your objective, you will not know where to start in your website’s
construction.
There are many objectives you can have for a website:
- attracting potential clients to get their business is one objective
you all have
- selling products online; e-commerce
- promoting and selling a service
- Promoting an area; such as the PeddlersVillage.com site
- showing growth of your business through a News section
- attracting potential employees or partners
Determine your target market. You should have this defined through
your business plan. By defining what audience you are trying to
reach, you can develop the architecture for your web site and make
sure that your audience can easily find what they’re looking
for on your site – which is your main objective of building
a site!
2. Components – The content and design for
an effective website.
The options for developing the design and content of your website
are as wide and varied as all the people who give seminars on website
design and development. There are many ways to tackle the components
of your site once your objective has been defined.
If you are hiring a firm or designer to create your site, it is
best that you research for yourself the most effective company for
your particular needs. These resources can be found in the phone
book, online, or most reliably through referrals. If you like someone’s
site, ask them who produced it and how it was to work with them.
At the very least, make sure you look through a company’s
portfolio and ask them for client referrals.
There are 4 topics to web site components we will cover in this
section:
A. Domain Names
B. Web site Hosting
C. Content – design, text, and images
D. Navigation – how users get around your site
E. Ongoing maintenance of your website
A. Domain Names
Your Domaing Name should be short and memorable, or very descriptive
like PeddlersVillage.com; the perfect Domain Name for the promotion
of this area.
B. Web site Hosting
Web site hosting is a necessary purchase that runs from $3 a month
to $50 a month or more depending on how many requirements your site
has. A simple brochure-type of web site will need the basic hosting
package, whereas a sophisticated site with a Content Management
System (CMS) will need a little more resources from the Hosting
Server.
C. Content – design, text, and images
Publishing on the net is different from writing for a publication.
What you write should add value and make your target audience want
to return.
Review your web page objectives and your target audience and make
your web site’s message suit that audience.
Are you writing to sell products? Bullet point about features and
benefits are very helpful for viewers. Are you writing to get people
INTO your shop? Great images and great text will help viewers get
a sense of the shop’s culture and atmosphere.
Be careful, not to overdo photos, graphics, multimedia, and music
on your site. Graphics, for example are often large files that take
time to download. Most people won't wait more than five seconds
for a web page to load and many different types of personal computers,
modems and versions of software are used so it is difficult to determine
who will wait to see your Flashy splash page load and who will not.
A web page that loads quickly on your machine might not function
quite as well on another.
The design for your website should fit within your business's branding.
Use the same look, feel, fonts, logo, and tagline. Create the same
feeling on your site that your store has. Create a consistent look
across all your materials, print and web if you haven’t already!
Always keep your site's content current and fresh. Add press releases
and new business news to your site. Add new products often and remove
the ones you don’t sell. And don't forget to check your spelling
and grammar before publishing your pages! Spelling mistakes, as
in any business communications reflect a poor image.
D. Navigation
Think carefully about how visitors will navigate through your site.
Try to maintain the same theme and branding throughout your site
so that visitors know they are still on YOUR site.
Make sure your site has consistent navigation on every page. What
this means is if I am on the PeddlersVillage.com site, and I go
to Shopping; I want to be able to easily return to Dining whenever
I need to. This site happens to handle this effectively; it always
lets me know where I am by keeping the same navigation from the
home page on the interior pages.
E. Ongoing Site Maintenance
When you first develop your site, you can have a CMS (Content Management
System) put into place to manage your site through a sort of “back
window” that no one can access without a username and password.
This takes extra money upfront as you build your site. It also will
take extra time away from your business because you will be keeping
your own site updated. However, in the long run, if you update your
site a lot, which is recommended, it will benefit you in the long
run.
The second option for maintenance is to have your original site
designer/developer make changes to your site. Often, we will receive
a fax or an email outlining all of a site’s changes for that
month. We then implement them, put them up online, and let the client
know they are ready and the site has been updated.
3. Driving Traffic to Your Site
This is the most widely debated and sophisticated part of developing
your website.
If you put a book on Amazon.com with out the correct type of promotion,
most likely very few people will find that book unless it is by
accident. Even then, they may not be you target audience and so
they may pass right by it.
The same holds true for websites. With several billion pages on
the Internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote,
unless it is well promoted.
There are a couple ways to get users to your site:
- Search Engines
- Direct Mail Marketing
- Having the website address on EVERY piece of material you give
to ANYONE
Large companies often have an entire staff dedicated to Search Engine
optimization for their web sites. The primary action step you will
want to take in search engine optimization is adding your Domain
Name (URL, example http://www.PeddlersVillage.com) to the major
search engines. I do not recommend paying for the addition of your
URL to a search engine. Your site WILL be found "organically"
without paying.
The title and first paragraph on your page are important
for indexing purposes. Your first paragraph on each page should therefore contain a concise
overview of the page.
Meta tags are specified by the web page developer using HTML statements
that are invisible to the visitor. Alternative spellings and synonyms
of important words on your page should be included as meta "keywords".
The web page developer can also specify a meta "description"
which summarizes the page content. This descriptive text is used
as the page summary in search engines. If a meta description has
not been specified for your page, the robot or crawler will just
select a few random lines of text from your page to be used as the
page description.
Summary
As a business owner, or employee, a web site helps you market and
sell your business to thousands of people who are searching specifically
for just your type of product.
In general, when you select a company to work with in designing/developing
your website, the cost will depend on the type of website you want
to create (brochure-ware, e-commerce, CMS, etc). When you begin
your search, have in mind your web site’s objective. This
will help your agency develop a more accurate price quote.
An successful web site will help you market your business by presenting
your company in the manner that you designate, with your product
as YOU want people to see it. By concentrating efforts on creating
an effective site, it is inevitable that you will expand the success
of your business!
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