Period Three Blog

May022010

The One Thing Most Small Business Websites Lack..

Posted by Gene in Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

Sometimes, as a professional web designer, you can bring up a topic with a client and almost literally watch their eyes glaze over. I suspect that some of this comes from the fact that those of us in the business like to use technical terms; another contributing factor could be the constant flow of new technologies — what seems great and special today is often out of style tomorrow.

For that reason, it’s no surprise that so many small business owners overlook the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) when it comes to designing a new site. After all, so long as your site looks good and does what it’s supposed to, isn’t that good enough? Does it even matter where your business shows up in the listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

Believe it or not, it really does. That’s because, if your site ranks well among some important keyword groups, you could be seeing twenty times as many visitors to your pages as you would if you didn’t. Think of how many dozens or hundreds of customers that could add up to — not to mention what they would mean to your bottom line. And best of all, they’d keep coming around the clock, from all over the world, at virtually no cost. I know from experience that a few of you are thinking: “That sounds great, but my business doesn’t get many orders from the web. In fact, most of my customers are local.” Would you still benefit from SEO in that case? The answer, once again, it was a resounding yes. There are two reasons you still want to be doing well with search engines. The first is that just because you aren’t getting business from outside of your own area now, doesn’t mean you couldn’t be later. There are very, very few companies — large or small – that can’t benefit from extending their reach a bit.

But more importantly, you want to make it easy for your business to be found online by your existing customers. Think about it: if the people who are already buying from you can’t locate you online, who are they likely to find? Regardless of what industry you’re in, you can bet you have competitors in your industry who would love to eat your lunch.

If you think your business is immune to this kind of threat, think again. I’ve seen situations where competing businesses have gone so far as to choose each other’s names as targeted keywords. In other words, if your customers aren’t finding you, you can be sure they’re finding somebody.

Search engine optimization might seem like an important strategy for sites that are focused on e-commerce and online orders, and it is. But even if the majority of your business isn’t coming in over the Internet, it’s important that you have a strong presence on the major search engines. Because as great as your work or product might be, it’s hard to make money, online or elsewhere, when no one can find you.

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Mar152010

3 things most business owners think they know about e-commerce… and why those myths can cost you money

Posted by Gene in Business

Online business is a hot topic. It has been for more than 10 years, and I can’t see that trend dropping off anytime soon. In most cases, that’s a good thing; the more business owners know about finding new customers on the Internet, the healthier their bottom lines are going to look.

The problem with this, though, is that e-commerce is a bit like professional sports — you have a few professionals, a handful of serious fans, and a whole lot of opinions that don’t always make sense. But while there’s no harm in chatting up your team’s chances with a few of your friends, having the wrong ideas about online marketing can spell disaster for your business.

Here are three things lots of business owners think they know about e-commerce, and how to keep those myths from costing you big money:

Flashier is always better. The latest and greatest are so-called for a reason; having cutting-edge animation, vibrant music, or a brand-new content management system on your website can all be great things. But go too far, and they can also cost you business.

When designing a new site, a question that should come up frequently is this: that’s cool, but what will it help me do? You might want people who visit your site to buy, ask for more information, or maybe just be more informed. Anything that helps them do those is useful; anything that doesn’t is just in the way.

It’s worked before, so there’s no reason to change now. Alternatively, we frequently see businesses with sites that look like they were designed a decade ago — the equivalent of decorating your office or showroom with a 50’s style decor.

Just because your company’s website shows all of your main information, or even generates a few leads and sales here and there, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. For many businesses, the homepage is a prospective customer’s first stop. You want them to see something that creates a strong, positive impression. And at the same time, most older sites aren’t bringing the kind of traffic, or sales, that they could if they were brought up to date here.

It’s all about the sales. Before I start on this one, let me clarify: for some companies, it really is all about the sales. For every dollar spent on search engine marketing or online advertising, they need to gain so many more in online revenue for the campaign to make any sense.

For the majority of small businesses, however, there are several other pieces to the puzzle. That’s because a good site doesn’t just generate orders — in fact, lots of the best performing websites don’t even have shopping carts or payment processing. Your site might be designed to answer questions, generate leads, show off your expertise, or fulfill any one of a dozen other functions. Those are all valuable, so long as they contribute to your business goals.

Keep these ideas in mind the next time you’re talking small business websites with your friends and colleagues. When it comes to online business, everybody has an opinion, but it’s finding profits that counts.

This article was originally written for and published on Midlandsbiz.com

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Mar012010

Is a New Website a Good Investment in This Economy?

Posted by Gene in Business

With all the ups and downs the economy has been throwing at us lately, many of my clients are asking themselves the same question: is this really the right time to have my website designed or upgraded?

I suspect the answer you find to that question will have a lot to do with your profitability for the next 12 months. That’s because, like a new employee or an improved piece of equipment, a good website shouldn’t cost you anything — it should earn money by improving your marketing and productivity.

A modern, functional, professional-looking website is one of the most valuable investments you can ever make. It’s like having your best salesperson, your strongest client letter, shiniest storefront space, and most courteous customer service professional all wrapped into one — not to mention working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for customers and prospects all over the world.

If it sounds like I’m a bit overzealous in my assessment, consider this: how many new customers can any single person bring in per week? Can they reach potential buyers at the exact moment that they are thinking about your product and service? What about answering your twenty frequently most asked questions instantly, or sending routine orders straight to your inbox without requiring you to copy down payment information? These are just a few of the things a good website can do for you, day in and day out.

With that in mind, the question isn’t really whether a new site is a good expense, but what kind of design or upgrade you should be looking at. The perfect website — one that looks good, does everything you want it to, and helps you meet your business goals — doesn’t happen by accident. It’s nearly always the result of careful planning and collaboration between the client and a dedicated design team.

To get your money’s worth, and use your online presence to actually grow your business in a tough economy, do a bit of planning before you fork over your deposit check. Think carefully about what types of products and customers you’re doing well with at the moment, as well as which aspects of your business you’d like to emphasize going forward. Don’t worry so much about the specific features (like video, flash animation, blogs, etc.) that you’ll want to incorporate for the moment — your design team can help you figure out which options make the most sense. The one thing they can’t do is tell you what your company needs in the first place.

There’s never a bad time to put one of your most powerful marketing tools to work, and a new website could be a driving force that helps you gain ground during the current slump. But to make it worth your time and money, you’re going to have to plan ahead and see your new design for what it is: a chance to boost your bottom line in any economy.

This article was originally published on MidlandsBiz.

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Feb162010

UMS design panel parts 1 & 2

Posted by Gene in Design, Web Development

In our recent design panel with Jason Beaird (@jasongraphix) and Molly Oakley(@mollyoakley) on unmatchedstyle.com, we talk about a few things, from current sites to design review processes within their companies to new and interesting techniques they are incorporating into their work.

In Part 1 above, we talk about Dribbble.com, the new (and still invite-only) social inspiration site.

In part 2 we talk about the design review process at their companies, then move onto to some new techniques being incorporated into their work. We finish up by focusing a bit on the great font site, fontsquirrel.com.

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Jan192010

Talking with Hiten Shah - crazyegg, kissmetrics to name a few

Posted by Gene in Business, Web Development

Disclaimer: This is a cross post from unmatchedstyle.com

Recently I was able to get Hiten Shah (@hnshah) to sit down with us and give us a quick run down of what he’s got going on with his great web products: KissMetrics, CrazyEgg, Survey.io to name just three. Keep in mind Hiten is probably the coolest person you’ll ever meet, especially since this is the second sit down he did with me as I completely destroyed the first recording we did. So a really big thank you for being so awesome Hiten!

We first got to talk through his great new analytics product KissMetrics.com, which is now in private beta (@kissmetrics). What makes KissMetrics so useful is it’s ability to get at the core of what’s driving consumers to your products and truly helps you analyze what makes them buy. In their own words:

KISSmetrics is different from other analytics platforms due to a combination of three key features. We focus on funnels and conversions and make them easy to track and interpret, use people as the basic unit of measure, and support tracking of highly-flexible custom data through our simple API.

We discussed Survey.io (demo here), how we are using it here on UMS and the background behind the creation of the survey system. You can read more about it here, but here’s some background on the survey itself:

The surveys you can create using Survey.io have been hand crafted by Sean Ellis. He has been practicing metrics driven marketing and customer development for 12 years. Currently he is advising startups to enable them to reach their full potential by applying his 12in6 methodology.

Survey.io was designed and developed by the KISSmetrics team. KISSmetrics is a customer development platform with sufficient flexibility to give you visibility into what’s working and what’s not in your product. The tools and technology help you measure what’s happening and tune the user experience.

Finally we covered the future and recent updates for CrazyEgg.com. We love CrazyEgg and use it all the time for our own design projects.

Thanks for the quick update Hiten!

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Jan062010

Episode 31 - UMS Design Review

Posted by Gene in Design

It’s been a while, we’ve been busy I promise. Here’s a quick post to try to get back into things. I think you’ll like this one too. It covers an interesting design concept which is using a “special effect” or some other feature that’s “cool” to make people take notice of your website, but how in the end that might actually hurt you since it may not have anything to do with your website’s content.

This week we talk about three sites, WebMynd, We Bleed Design and ADII Rockstar. In addition to the design, we discuss the usefulness (or detriment) of having visitors come to your site for reasons unrelated to the actual content of your site.

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Oct202009

Permission marketing and active-lurkers

Posted by Gene in Marketing, Creating Community

It’s not just that you have users who do stuff and users who don’t, there is an in-between too. The “active-lurker”. I’ve borrowed heavily from a couple of sources to make the following points, starting with Joshua Porter’s post on Designing for Active Lurkers.

This post and Joshua’s post are all based on idea by Bradley Horowitz when he’s talking about the communities surrounding Yahoo’s many services like Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Upcoming & del.icio.us. The idea is that there are phases a non-interacting visitor (lurker) goes through before he/she becomes a content creator or conversion:
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1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)

10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress

100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

So, most of your users (even the contributors) are going to be passive most of the time.

This is permission marketing at it’s basic core. Real permission marketing is when people opt-in, not the legalistic definition not the CAN-SPAM law, but real people wanting to read your stuff and then choosing to participate when they feel passionate about a subject…

As Joshua Porter reminds us about what Seth Godin says:

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” - Seth Godin

Here’s an example: On colamovies.com, we want more movie reviewers, but it makes logical sense that in order to get more reviewers we need to continue to focus on cultivating the visitor base that simply uses the website for movie times, then make it easy for those visitors to make reviews. The same is just as in the analogy Porter makes from Fred Wilson:

Just like bookstores use cafes to bring potential purchasers in the store, online retailers should intentionally cultivate an active non-transactor user base.

In other words, the big book stores use fluffy comfortable chairs and coffee to get you into the store to read the books in order to entice you into making a purchase…

So they key to transforming lurkers into active participants is to think of how to engage based on their current activity. Don’t just look at the current conversions and the paths those visitors took to convert. Look at the traffic patterns below the conversion, what are they searching for? What lead them to you? How are they using your website in ways you don’t intend?

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Sep292009

The secret to credibility

Posted by Gene in Branding, Creating Community

We get asked often to “bring more traffic to my website” and one of the suggestions we often make is for you to begin creating content you can share with your customers. Sharing information about what you know and how you do things can often lead to more trust and repeat customers, it also can go a long way to making you an expert in what you do. What does that have to do with credibility? Here’s the thing, when you ask us to bring your website more traffic, what you’re really asking is bring more clients, or more conversions - traffic alone is not the answer to this. More traffic won’t hurt mind you, but what good will it do if no one thinks you know what you’re talking about or if they can’t connect with you. Here’s a secret formula:

I learned this from a post on problogger.net a while back. There is no overnight route to creating credibility, and you have to build upon your audience (client base) and grow it. What are the benefits of creating credibility for your website? Those would be two fold:

1) Gives you the ability to change user attitudes toward you:
Keeps you in a positive light, they feel comfortable interacting with you, they embrace your point of view.

2) Give you the ability to change user behavior.
They give you their personal information, they complete a transaction, they return to your site often.

Trustworthiness and Expertise are two pretty huge things to work on with every news release and blog post you make, it takes time and planning but it can be worth it in a huge way when you achieve it.

Keep in mind this formula is talking about creating the perception of credibility, you can easily reverse all your hard work in an instant if you don’t actually live up to what you’ve created.

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Aug262009

Big guide to CSS support in email clients

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The team over at Campaign Monitor has recently updated their giant CSS support guide to email clients and boy is it awesome. I’ve been designing and coding HTML emails for for almost 10 years now *sigh* and it never gets easier. It seems every month a new email client comes out, then there’s the iPhone now. Resources like these become invaluable to you if you do this kind of work. In their own words:

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

Make sure and check out the web guide, you can also download the full spreadsheet for all the known email client support info.

Thank you Campaign Monitor!

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Aug202009

Game changer on Facebook

Posted by Gene in Social Web

Gary Vaynerchuck gives us a sneak peek at some Facebook functionality that they are testing that big users like him get to preview before the rest of us. By the way, if you don’t know who Gary is yet, check him out, a lot of what he says is simple stuff but it’s really good to hear.

Looks like Facebook is going to make the social timeline more public, allowing you to interact with other users who you may not be friends with. Not sure how that’ll work, most likely it’ll get released for groups and pages first - where it makes the most sense. The ability to look at other people (who you don’t follow) and review their posts and comments then choose to follow/engage with them has long been Twitter’s advantage over Facebook. It’ll be really interesting to see how all this actually comes out.

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