Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Dec
18
When developing a new website, site design and usability should be one of the highest priorities on your development list. Without a usable design, users will quickly become frustrated with your website and will stop visiting. Thankfully, there are a few basic usability practices that you can employ to help make your visitors’ experiences the best they can be.
- Use different colors. Color design on your website should not be garish or unprofessional, but you can utilize different colors to help draw attention to various portions of your website. If, for example, you wish to emphasize certain points in your content, then a bold red or blue color will draw a visitor’s eye directly to that portion of the site. You can also draw attention to other portions of your website, such as your navigation bar or certain pages that you want to attract more attention. Be cautious of over-using colors, though, since a proliferation of different, non-complementary colors on a website is a surefire way to drive people away from your site.
- Focus your design on the objective. The design of a website should always focus on the end goal of the site. If the site is designed to inform people, then the focus should be predominately on content and ease of navigation. If your goal is to sell a product, then focusing a design around product displays and easy product searches should be your goal. In focusing on your goal, you can use colors and design patterns that help draw the attention of the customer to certain portions of the website. You can also make things like checking out easy, which will reduce the chances that they will become frustrated with the site and leave before making a purchase. Regardless of the goal, designing your site and marketing it with certain features being in dominance will help stimulate traffic throughput, and is likely to increase your overall return on investment (ROI).
- Use a consistent formatting scheme. There are few things worse than a website whose formatting and design is inconsistent from page to page. This type of haphazard design and layout smacks of unprofessionalism, and is a big turn-off to visitors. Even if your website consists of only one or two pages, use a consistent design across them. If you have different sections of your web site that require differing designs, link them with some common theme, like a header that remains the same, or a sidebar that doesn’t change. If you can make transitions between designs on your website nonexistent or as smooth as possible, then your internet visitors will feel less jolted during their time on your website.
- Have simple buttons and links. Long links and large, flashing buttons can be difficult on the eyes and makes it difficult for people on a website to navigate around to different pages. Oversized, flashing, oddly colored and unnaturally placed buttons distract from your content and keep visitors away from your website. To avoid this, design your buttons with simplicity in mind, and steer away from ones that are unconventional. Oversized links that join multiple words in a sentence are also distracting, and it can be difficult for a user to tell if the collection of words is one link, or multiple links all next to each other. Instead of creating links that span multiple words, just use one word, or two at most. The users of your website will then be able to enjoy the content you have created without getting distracted by annoying underlining and linking.
- Provide a sitemap. A sitemap, while sometimes thought of as outdated, is extremely helpful, especially for larger sites. New visitors to your site will benefit from a sitemap, since it will provide them with an easy way to view all of the pages and sections of your site. If a new visitor comes to your website from the internet, then having a sitemap to direct them to the page they want to go will be a huge help from a usability standpoint. It will also provide repeat visitors with a way to stay up to date on new parts of your website, and will let them find pages on it that they haven’t seen before.
- Make all sections of the site easy to access. Above all, make sure that your site is easy to access, both for novices and experts. Don’t make links confusing, and avoid any unnecessary obfuscation. If you want to keep people out of a certain part of your website, then either don’t put it up on the internet, or use a password system to protect it. You should also have links on all of your pages that remain consistent in a place like a header, footer or sidebar. These links should go to main pages on your website, such as the homepage, a contact page or other important pages. This reliable set of links will make navigation and accessibility each for users, and will encourage first-time visitors to come back again and again.
Creating a website with good usability traits can be difficult, but the rewards are well worth it. Increased traffic, a higher ROI and more success from your marketing campaigns will all result from your initial hard work in putting the site together. By following these few usability tips, you can make this process much easier.
Posted in Marketing, SEO, Web & SEO, Web Design
Oct
31
This is a great post about social networks and really points out the control and choice that people have when it comes to consuming information and forming relationships. For me, it also points out fundamental problems with so many company’s social marketing strategies. The idea that you can simply create a blog and people will come and read it, push out a podcast and throngs of individuals will come clamoring to listen to it, or upload a video to YouTube and expect thousands to come watch it is mistaken. It is more of a conversation than that. People interact with people, not faceless businesses. It requires active participation, and you must add value in some way. From an ROI perspective, it may not behoove you to participate. The question of whether it should be a part of your marketing budget really depends on your product and service offerings, what you are trying to achieve, and who your audience is.
However, from a personal and professional development standpoint, especially if you are in marketing, advertising, or pr, it is extremely important. What do you see when you Google yourself? Not much? That probably doesn’t help you in a business climate that increasingly relies on the web. Social networks offer the ability to dramatically improve your personal scalability. In addition, you will get to meet people you might not have otherwise met, and have the chance to learn more than you would have ever expected. You will grow your personal brand and while doing it, guess what, you might also find the right opportunity to introduce the brand that cuts you your paycheck.
Posted in Marketing, Social
Oct
2
In some ways, Kevin Rose and his Revision 3 partner, Alex Albrecht have become symbols of user-generated media. Their podcast show, Diggnation was one of the first out of the gate to build a substantial audience, and most recently, Kevin Rose was selected as one of Tech Review’s “2007 Young Innovators Under 35.” Kevin was selected because of the impact he’s had on the way people consume news through online social bookmarking and community rating or “digging” stories up or down. You can read more about it here, but here is an excerpt:
Digg, mixes blogging, online syndication, social networking, and “crowdsourcing”–which combines the knowledge and opinions of many individuals–to create an online newspaper of stories selected by the masses.
If you are not immediately awe-struck by the effective combination of community and technology then know this - Digg receives more than 17 million visitors to the site each month. Obviously, there is a substantial user-base who enjoy consuming, contributing, and interacting with content in this way. But aside from Kevin’s recent recognition, this is old news.
What really prompted this blog post was a video interview (see below) with Kevin Rose at MIT. It resonated with me because I have recently been doing some social marketing strategy work for a client, and a major part of it is creating and distributing content that can be consumed in a multitude of channels to reach the widest possible audience. Seems simple enough, but a lot of marketers only make it part way, or they leave out one little piece like, providing an embed code for their videos, syndicating content through RSS, or actually going where the audience is to carry the message further.
Are consumers’ habits constantly changing? Are there preferences more customizable? Are you less in control of your brand? Can the struggle to continually be relevant be difficult? Yes-Yes-Yes-and Yes. But in a lot of ways it is easier than ever before to deliver your message, assuming, of course, that it is actually something people can relate to and want to see, hear, and pass on to others.
Posted in Marketing, Podcast, Social
Sep
5
Want to know about one simple SEO strategy that takes less than five minutes to implement and can have a very positive result in regards to rankings in the search engines? If so get ready to change the footer on your website.
The footer on your website usually simply contains a copyright statement and sometimes some other links. Many websites have a two line footer where one line is devoted to links and the other is devoted only to the copyright. Adding a company statement to your footer is an easy way to implement an seo strategy that is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. Here is an example:
Previous footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses
New SEO Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses - A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah
It usually works best when you have the text footer [non-link footer] fit on one line. Here are some key points that this new footer accomplishes:
1. This particular website or business is focused on providing web design, web development, seo or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services. Although that is a very long list sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can fit in a footer. The above example ensures that every single page of the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This will help the search engines recognize that this website is related to those key terms since they appear on every webpage. This strategy not only assists search engines in knowing what services you may provide but also human web visitors. If a website visitor can not figure out what the website is all about they general do one of two actions; either leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this line of text in the footer ensures that if they do glance at the footer they will be able to know what the website is about without having to click to another page.
2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah‘ in the sentence. Twelve Horses has headquarters in Reno, Nevada with a secondary office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets the search engines know what geographic area this particular website primarily provides web services to. You may wonder why the footer contains Reno, a city, and Utah, a state. Through some keyword research it was discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]‘ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]‘, maybe because Salt Lake City is too long or time consuming to type out and Utah only has one major metropolitan area which is the wasatch front. On the other hand Nevada contains several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are spread out from each other. From keyword research we discovered people in Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are in compared to just ‘Nevada [keyword]‘. Again, this also provides website visitors information on the geographic area the company is based in by glancing at the footer.
3. This is a very simple and effective SEO strategy that literally should only take 5-10 minutes to implement on your website and will have a profound effective compared to the investment of time that is required.
If you enjoyed this SEO strategy and would like us to post more please post a comment and we will be happy to share our knowledge with you.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Reno-Tahoe, SEO, Salt Lake City, Utah, Web & SEO, Web Design
