Intellisites, the smart choice for web design

Remember when JT and Madonna sang that peculiar little song about how they only had four minutes to save the world?  That really doesn’t seem like enough time to save the world, or, do much of anything, actually.

Well, you, my friend, have only five seconds.

Okay you don’t have to save the world, but it takes only five seconds for a visitor to your site to gather enough information to determine whether to go back out to the web or to stick around.  So you’ve got that much time to hook them.

And how is that accomplished?

You basically have to do one of three things to intrigue the average web surfer enough to hang around.

1. Deliver a Call to Action.  In other words, set up some kind of enticing button on your home page that pushes the visitor farther into the site right away.  We’re talking about a “Click Here for a Free Quote” or “Hundreds of Items On Sale - Today Only!  Click Here to Shop!”  Those types of appeals get the casual browser involved right away, causing him to stay around for awhile.

2. Communicate Your Unique Selling Position. You need to sell your uniqueness right off the bat.  Your home page has to be YOU, and make people see that YOU are different from and better than your competitors.  In the first five seconds, the visitor isn’t going to get the full picture of you, but if you have the right layout, design and content, they’ll get your vibe.  Are you the eco-friendly choice?  The professional choice with years of experience?  The new funky alternative choice?  Your page should be designed to reflect attributes like that in a way that a visitor can pick up in five seconds or less.

3. Give Them Something Valuable. If a visitor finds something with perceived value right on your home page, he’ll stick around to find out what else you’re giving out.  It may be as simple as some good content that answers his questions.  If it looks like you know your stuff, and you deliver the right message right away, visitors will likely poke around to find out what other information you have to share.  In addition to appealing content, an actual giveaway could also do the trick.  This idea links back to the previously mentioned suggestion of a call to action. You could use that call to action to do a giveaway (e.g. “Click here for your FREE coupon!”).

So, if you want your casual browsers to delve deep into that website of yours, you need to have something significant going on as soon as they enter the site.  Whether it’s your unique charm, some free information or a giveaway, or a flashy clicky button, make sure that you have something that will keep your visitors interested past those first five seconds.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Okay, so now it’s time for Sample Problem #2.

This week, we’ll be taking a look at a pretend non-profit organization as it attempts to use e-marketing to collect some paper for its noble cause.  We’ll call the nonprofit something a little corny and obvious like Holy Shirts and Pants.  Whoops, that’s already taken.  Okay, we’ll go with Kollecting for Kids, and we’ll say their role in the community is to collect money to buy toys for underprivileged children.  We’ll say the NPO has a pretty good following on social networking sites - including 3000 Facebook fans and 500 followers on Twitter.

So, with our background set, let’s look at the sitch that Kollecting for Kids was in when their campaign began.

They needed to market their annual campaign to raise money to buy holiday gifts for kids.  Our recommendation to them was to put together a campaign that leverages their social media connections to generate donations.

We encouraged them to start by coming up with five blog entries that each focused on convincing people to donate money to their charity.  The idea was to really pull on the readers’ heartstrings and move them to donate.  These blog entries incorporated specific anecdotes about real children who would be helped by this campaign, and every entry included a section specifically asking for donations and linking to a donation site.

With the blog entries prewritten, KFK published one entry every Monday for the five weeks leading up to Christmas.  They connected their blog to facebook and twitter too, so every week the Facebook fans and Twitter followers had another opportunity to hear a compelling reason to donate.

So without spending any money, KFK was able to generate 17,500 impressions.  And if even 1% of the fans and followers were moved to donate, there would be a lot of happy kids on Christmas.

That’s right, boys and girls.  You too can use the magic of Twitter and Facebook for free advertising!  And whether you run a non-profit or a for-profit business, you’ll be shocked at how effective it can really be.

It’s safe to say that traffic to your website is a good thing.  Any visitor to your web page are like people walking into your store. It’s a good sign.

But what we really like to see are visitors who kick off their shoes and stay awhile.  After all, those are the visitors who are likely to go from browsing to buying.

A website’s “bounce rate” helps to determine whether visitors to the site tend to poke around or leave the site right away.  It’s figured out by making a little fraction with the number of visitors who don’t click past the first page of a site divided by the total number of visitors to the site.  Change that fraction to a percent, and you’ve got bounce rate.

For example, if your site has 100 visitors and 50 left after seeing your homepage, you have a 50% bounce rate.  If that really was your bounce rate, by the way, would indicate that you have some work to do on your homepage.  Ideally, you are looking for a bounce rate of around 35-40%. Because no matter what you do, there are a lot of tire-kickers in the world.

How Low Can Your Bounce Rate Go?

What can you do help your bounce rate shrink?  It’s all about the awesomeness level of your homepage.  The more that your homepage pulls people in, the lower your bounce rate will go.  And the more sales you will ultimately make.

You can help that bounce rate shape up by making some changes to your home page, like…

• Adding Call to Action Buttons.  Get your visitors hooked right away by incorporating a tempting button that’s just begging to be clicked.
• Making Your Copy Convincing. The text on your homepage has to sell.  Make sure it makes your visitors thirsty for more.
• Offering Free Stuff.  It never hurts to offer a little incentive.  If you want people to dig deeper into the site, let them know that there is a treasure in there somewhere.  (You don’t have to give away the store for this to work.  We’re talking about a coupon.  A free sample.  Maybe free shipping.  It doesn’t have to be a million dollar prize to catch someone’s attention.)
• Keeping Things Interesting With a Blog. Blogs are really getting to be a big thing.  Make sure to include a prominently displayed link to yours on your home page.  You’ll be surprised how many people you can hook in just by promising the opportunity to read your thoughts.

All right, that’s it for now — time to bounce.  (Sorry.  Couldn’t resist.)

Sometimes certain websites rub search engines the wrong way.  But keeping search engines happy with your website is enormously important if you want website traffic.

So…what kinds of things tick search engines off?

1. Site Structure. I talked a little bit about tables vs. DIV/CSS in a previous entry, but to reiterate, search engines aren’t big fans of websites constructed in table format.  If your website is made using tables, it’s probably time to rebuild.

2. Buckshot style keyword selection. In an attempt to drive traffic to their sites, some people select tons of semi-relevant keywords.  This might have helped their search engine rankings 5-7 years ago, but search engines have become wise to this overkill technique, and now having 67 keywords can actually make your search engine rankings lower.

3. Irrelevant tags. Another way some people try to slyly increase their search engine rankings is by including slightly relevant or completely irrelevant image (or other) tags.  Again, this sneaky idea might have helped them out back in the day, but in 2010, search engines will put the hurt on you for that trick.

4. Irrelevant content. From an SEO standpoint, the content of your site has to be relevant to the back end content of your site.  Among other things, making sure your relevant keywords are present in the copy is big.

5. No updates. Search engines like dynamic websites that change and grow.  If you are neglecting your site, so will Google.  Keep things interesting on your website, and the search engines will appreciate your efforts.

Not sure if your website is a culprit of a search engine faux pas?  We’ll gladly check it out, and, if needed, work to patch up the relationship between the search engines and your site so you can all be friends.  That’s what we do - making peace on the web, one website at a time.

I’m an example kind of person.  Back in high school, my math teachers could talk about polynomials and imaginary numbers all day, but I would stare at them blankly until I snuck a peek at sample problems #1 and #2 in the book.  Walking through these made everything click.

Let’s look at an example of the kinds of things we’ve been chatting about on this blog: how a company can use web technology to set up an e-marketing campaign, start to finish.

Let’s talk about Bababerino Diapers. A local (fictional) business that sells (surprise!) diapers.  The marketing folks at Bababerino have already encouraged their customers to register an e-mail address on Bababerino.com in exchange for some printable coupons. After a year of collecting, the company has collected e-mail addresses for 3,000 baby mamas and daddies.

The sales crew at Bababerino was preparing for their big holiday sales push - trying to sell 300 “Mucho Packs” of diapers online.  They set a goal of one week to complete the push, and offered the Mucho Packs at a 30% discount.

To help guarantee their success, they leveraged their database of customer emails.

They sent an e-mail to their 3000 customer mailing list.  The text of the e-mail read, “We want to let our best customers in on a little secret.  Our quality diapers are online at an unbelievably low price!  Click below to get a coupon code that will entitle you to 30% off our mucho pack.  That’s a savings of almost $20!  But you have to act fast - this sale only lasts until Friday.”  Under the text was a huge, brightly-colored button that read, “Click now for your money-saving coupon code!”

The Bababerino team set up a landing page where e-mail recipients would arrive when they clicked on the big tempting button.  On the landing page visitors found the code “DIAPERS4XMAS” positioned right next to a big flashy button that said “Get My Discount Now!” When clicked, visitors were directed to an online catalog where they could add as many Mucho Packs to their cart as they wanted.  To stress the limited time frame for the promotion, the Bababerino people added a clock to the page, counting down the seconds until the end of the sale.

Using persuasive language on an e-mail and a subsequent landing page, Bababerino made a pretty solid case for why their customers should purchase their mucho packs right away.  And whats more - they made it extremely easy for their customers to buy from them. Even if only one customer in ten was enticed enough to order, Bababerino would easily reach their goal.  And that means happy Bababerino employees, hundreds of satisfied customers, and just as many dry baby bums.

Let’s dish a little bit about landing pages.  I’ve mentioned them here and there in previous posts, but darn it, it’s time to give them the spotlight for once.  After all, they’re pretty super.

The idea behind a landing page is to elicit a specific action from your client.  It might as well have a big red flashing button on it that screams CLICK HERE NOW!  YES, WE MEAN YOU!  (And some of them actually do, although most others are subtler.)  Your home page and many other pages on your site are what we might call “open ended”, very choose-your-own-adventure-esque.  On a landing page, conversely, your visitor is encouraged to do one specific thing.

Like What?

For instance, maybe you’re trying to collect contact info for your mailing list.  A landing page can include a form for your visitors to fill out and a large enticing button for them to click when they have finished.  You’d make the button enticing by having the copy on it read something like “Click here for your discount code!” or “Click here for a free trip to the zoo!”

Or, depending on how you set things up, perhaps you already have a separate page where the customer can fill in his contact info, and you could set up a landing page where the customer will end up (or y’know…land) after entering the information.  If on the first page, you promised the visitor a coupon code, this would be the page where they get it.  So now that they’ve arrived here, your goal is to get them to use it, pronto.  On this landing page, then, you would set up a large button encouraging the visitor to “Shop Now,” and clicking it would send the customer into your online catalogue.

Basically, the reason for these pages is to get your customer away from other distractions and choices so you can just come right out and ask them for something.  And if your writing on the page is compelling enough, they just might do it.

It might be an obvious point, but it’s one worth making - you want people to visit your website.

Other marketing efforts you may be running - e-mail campaigns, social media efforts, direct mail - are great and help to promote your company.  But don’t forget that in addition to promoting your company in general, they should also be promoting your website, specifically.

Here’s why - your website (should) have the most updated information about what’s going on with your business.  (It does, right?  Good.  Give yourself a pat on the back.)  It’s the place that you can advertise things like current promotions, new merchandise, up-to-date prices.  You want traffic at the website because you want people to have the most accurate information about your company.

Not to mention that getting your clients in the habit of visiting your website is never a bad idea because it brings your company name into your clients’ minds.  Once that site has been visited, it’s going in their internet history, or maybe even getting bookmarked, so it’s possible they could be seeing your company’s name every once in a while when they are clicking around on the web for other reasons.  And that’s totally free marketing for you.

So if you are planning to send out some type of printed mailer about your company, instead of including a coupon on that piece of paper, mention that there are coupons available on your website.  Or when you send out an e-mail blast, make reference to some “online only” promotions that can be accessed at your website.  Even on your social networking sites, the ultimate goal is to get people to click over to your actual website.  It’s great to have Facebook fans, but what you really want is for those people to visit your page where they can get tons more information (and maybe even make a purchase!).

The business that gets the most traffic on its website wins!

If you have an awesome website, you may think that you have taken care of a huge piece of your company’s marketing picture.  And you are correct.  Except for one thing.  Once you have an awesome website, you need to get people to visit your awesome website.

Let’s think back to years ago before you were a successful business owner.  At one time, you were probably a nine-year-old kid with a lemonade stand.  And, if you were a really motivated young entrepreneur, you may have decided to market your lemonade stand by printing up fliers on your dad’s Apple IIe.  After you had taken the time to design these fliers, would the nine-year-old you most likely A) leave the fliers on your back porch hoping that the wind would blow them around the neighborhood or B) take a spin around the neighborhood on your bike, passing fliers out to everyone you meet?  Chances are, if you really wanted to save up for that Atari, you got those fliers into people’s hot little hands. And on telephone poles, and on windshields, and in mailboxes…

You need to bring some of that youthful energy into promoting your website. You’ve worked hard to design a great website for your business, and you need people to see it so it can do its job and get you some work.  Luckily, bike riding around the neighborhood with fliers is not one of the recommended methods of advertising your site.

But here are a few things that might work.

Send out an e-mail blast. Remind your loyal customers that you have a website and that it’s worth checking out by e-mailing them a link.  That’s especially recommended if you’ve recently made changes to your page, or even better, added new features such as a blog or a link to a social networking page you’ve set up for your company.

Do some search engine optimization. The main way new customers will find your website is through their favorite search engine, and if you’re not one of the first ones that pops up, you’re in trouble.

Set up a pay-per-click campaign. This will get your site noticed on search engines, pronto.  For more info on how to do this, click here.

Send out a mailer. Here’s a throwback to your lemonade fliers – you can also remind your customers that you have a website by sending a message on actual paper through snail mail!  And for those of you who are still nine years old at heart — we didn’t mean to discourage you before – if your trusty Huffy is still kicking and you’re up for the challenge, no one’s going to stop you from hopping on and distributing them yourself.

It’s sad but true…humans are lazy buggers.  Most of us look for the path of least resistance in any given situation.  When given the choice between two options, we usually go with the choice that is easier.

I mean, really, when’s the last time you took the stairs to the 83^rd floor, used an abacus, or churned your own butter?

Exactly.

Even though using the web never takes as much energy as, say, a transatlantic swim, we’re still inclined to seek out the websites that are easiest to use, and we tend to complain about sites that slow us down or make things difficult for us.

If your clients are people like you, they are probably going to have the same types of complaints about your website that you have about sites that annoy you.  C’mon, you know that there are websites that push your buttons.  Maybe it’s your cell phone company’s site and it takes (gasp!) thirty seconds to load.  Or maybe it’s the site for a retailer whose online ordering process is drawn out and confusing.  Or it’s possible you went on a company’s website just looking for some information about its services, but the info you sought just wasn’t easily accessible.

Chances are, if you found yourself on a website with one of those symptoms or another exasperating issue, you gave up and found a competitor’s site that is easier to use.  And, in another living room across town, some other fellow who is surfing the web in his boxers might be giving up on your site because of the arduous challenges it presents.  Even if your issues are subtle, chances are, someone is going to turn away from your website in favor of one that saves him twelve seconds or an ounce of frustration.

The good news about criticism is that it can be constructive.  If your clients are moaning and groaning about aspects of your website, listen to what they have to say.  They can give you an outsider’s perspective on your site and help you understand the challenges a visitor will face.  This information will help you out big time when you start your redesign.

Remember, the customer is always right, even if he happens to be a complainer who likes to search the internet in his underwear.

The colors you choose for your web site say a lot. If your colors weren’t chosen by a professional designer, you might be surprised what they’re talking about.

I’ve touched on color in a previous entry, but it’s worth revisiting. With this article, I’d like to delve a little deeper into some common associations we have with certain colors.

The Emotional Spectrum

1. True Blue Most people have some kind of affinity towards blue. It’s used to imply things like cleanliness and harmony with nature. It’s also used to communicate trustworthiness, which is why insurance companies and investment firms like New York Life, Met Life, and Goldman Sachs use blue in their collateral. Your trust is essential to their success, and they know it.

There’s a downside to blue, though. We’ve all had “the blues” at one time or another, and we don’t want to use any “blue language” (i.e. curse words) when we talk to our customers. When choosing blue for a web site design, it’s important to frame it correctly.

2. Raising the Red Flag That phrase means to raise an objection or a warning about something. And red, being the hottest of the colors, can cause alarm. It’s used for stop signs because to miss one is often to put lives at risk. So unless you want your visitors to feel on-edge, you’ve got to be careful using red.

But it can be used to create good feelings too. Countless restaurants use red in their logos to make you feel hungry. Think McDonalds, Chili’s, Applebees, KFC (both before and after their recent rebrand) Burger King, Friday’s, and just about every other American chain. Used well, red is powerful in all the right ways. Used poorly, too much could put your site’s traffic ‘in the red’.

3. Give ‘Em the Green Light Green is the most soothing color in our palette. It’s inviting, calming, and encourages slowing down and smelling the flowers. The right green on your website could help it act as a magnet, giving your visitors a resting place on the visually noisy Internet.

Of course, that’s only good if you want people to rest on your site. If you’re building a landing page, maybe you want visitors to click through to another site. Too much green on a landing page could hamper your larger goal. So while green is a very pleasant color, it’s effects need to be weighed in the context of your goals.

4. They’ll Call You Mellow Yellow Actually, they probably won’t. I’m not sure what Donovan was thinking when he wrote his famous song - yellow is active, lively.

Used to convey positivity or caution, yellow has complex symbolism. One the one hand, the yellow ribbon is widely accepted as a symbol of hope. On the other hand, many warning signs and emergency vehicles make use of bright yellows. More recently, it’s meanings have come together to symbolize a third thing: cutting edge technology.

If you want to use yellow in your design, be especially careful with it’s intensity. The feel you are looking for is likely to be found in a careful choice of shade.

Too Much Info?

(by the way - if this all seems a tad overwhelming, we can help out. Web design is kind of our thing.)