Understanding Your Design
During the mockup phase you’ll receive a full size rendition of your web site design. When we discuss your layout it’ll help if you understand the parts of your design that we are focusing on and I’m hoping this blog article will help.
When creating a web site its ideal to have the same look and navigation throughout the site. Changing the look or navigation on each page can confuse your customer and make them more likely to leave your site to shop somewhere else. The only exceptions are catalog pages that may utilize categories to help make browsing easier, as long as the customer can still access the rest of your site too! Preferably you want to be able to get to anywhere on your site in 2 clicks or less and direct access is even better. The more accessible your products are, the more likely the customer will spend time browsing your site and finding an item they want to purchase. If your customer has to click “catalog” and select the “category” they want each time they want to look for another item, they will quickly become frustrated and shop elsewhere.
Web designs, especially those on cart systems, are built and coded in a template system. This means one or two files run the entire site. The content is the area within the template that changes depending on the page that the visitor is looking at. Generally I wont design for content because that will change on every page, instead I design for the over all look of the site. If you do have pages that need alternative navigation or design that requires another template to be made and not included in my design packages. Please ensure to specify that you require more than one look, or template before your project begins so that you are not surprised with the additional design fees associated with them.
Below are a couple web site examples that may help you understand the parts of the web layout and template.
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You have a web site, now what?
Having been a web designer for 6 years and working with small businesses for over 7 years, I’ve heard this a lot. “I have my web site, how do I get traffic and sales?” A lot of people think that once you have a web site, that’s it, work done. Nope! It is a never ending process to keep your site listed properly and make sure your potential clients can find you. Even more important, turn your visits into sales! Don’t have a site yet? Start here: I want a web site!
First of all, there are a few things that should be done even before you get to this point that I will touch on briefly.
1. Have a professional looking web site. Make sure your graphics look nice, your colors all flow, your coding is clean and you have good navigation and content. This first step is the most important step to keep visitors on your site. Web Design Rules According to Web Savvy Mama.
2. Know your market. You should already have browsed the web and found out who your direct competition is. What is working for them? What can you do to set yourself apart from them? Don’t rely on cheaper prices to get you a sale, this only works for physical products with professional looking websites. If you sell digital materials or a service, you are going to have to solely rely on word of mouth, portfolio and the impression your website gives. Why? You get what you pay for. While your cheaper item/service might be just as great as a competitors, potential customers may not look at it that way. Be competitive in pricing, don’t low ball your worth. Also know what your customers are wanting, not just what you want to give them. How can you convince them you have what they need?
Now on to the nitty gritty. You have a web site, you’ve done your research, now what?
1. Work on your SEO! Search Engine Optimization is super important. I’d say that the majority of my clients have found me through Google. This means you have to know what your keywords and phrases are and how to promote yourself in the search engines. It is such a big topic that I can’t get into it here, but I did write an article in 2007 that still has a lot of good information in it to get you started. Web Site Optimization, SEO.
2. Advertising, how and where. This falls back on knowing your target market. For me, mine is small business and specifically work at home parents. I first researched where those people tend to hang out on the web and focused my advertising there. For some this may be a large web forum or web site. Find out what it takes to do various advertising on those sites. Signature links on forums have worked well for me in the past. Again, keep in mind the keywords you want to benefit from the SEO! You can also try Google adsense but unless you have a larger budget or very specialized keywords, chances are its not going to be much bang for your buck. Participate in popular blog giveaways, get featured on other web sites and get friends to talk about you. Word of mouth advertising is the best advertising! Do Facebook and Twitter help? Most likely not, unless you already have a big following on your personal accounts and can piggy back from there. You can use these social network sites to help with SEO though!
3. Get a blog! This goes back, again, to SEO. It also generates something that visitors may want to come back to read and gets them onto your site again. I’ve written about this as well so read more at Add a blog? Yes Please!
You have the traffic, lets turn those visitors into sales!
1. Have a product that will sell!
2. Professional site with a cart.
3. Competitive prices.
4. No dead links!
5. Clear navigation.
6. Your visitors need to be very clear on what you are selling.
7. Clear form of contact method. They need to know they can reach you.
8. Offer something that no one else has. (Product, service, atmosphere, this could be anything!)
Can WSM Review Your Website?
I’m always looking for new ways to get my readers involved and I received a suggestion to do reviews. I think this is a great idea! Most blogs do product reviews, but since my readers are looking for web site tips I thought I’d do web reviews instead!
So how does this work?
Why would you want to have your site reviewed?
What’s the catch?
So how do I submit my site for review?
Do I need to link back to WSM?
No, but a link back is always appreciated if you wish to show your thanks!
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Web Design Rules According to WSM
I’ve been designing web sites for small businesses and work at home moms for nearly 5 years, during that time I’ve seen a lot of bad web site designs. I created a list of my own Do’s and Don’t s when it comes to web design. This is not a complete list, but one that I try to follow when I’m creating sites for clients. If you’re unsure about how to go about creating an effective web site, read on to get some ideas about what can make or break your web site.
Don’t: Use FrontPage or other WSYING editors, or graphical editors. These editors usually create messy HTML code that is not as easily read by all web browsers. They are also more likely to create both visible errors and other errors that may prevent your visitors from navigating your site effectively.
Do: Use clean HTML and CSS to design in a way that is W3C compatible. Using clean coding ensures that your site is usable by more users and accessible by those with disabilities as well. Dreamweaver or hand coding are your best options. Clean coding techniques also promote great SEO results! Read More…
Website Optimization, SEO
I get asked a lot of SEO questions from work at home moms and small business clients. It’s time for me to do a series on SEO to get some of these questions answered! Many people ask me “Do you *do* SEO?”. My answer is simply “No”. There are a lot of things you can do to an existing site to help with SEO but we’ll get to that later. The simple answer of “No” is because good SEO on a web site really needs to start in the planning stages of your web design! I focus on creating websites that are SEO friendly right from the start!
Let’s start out with the basics! SEO? What’s that? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When people are talking about SEO they are referring to search engines and how you are indexed. The optimization part comes into play when we talk about how you get your site prepared to be listed, how you manage your site to maintain listings and how to increase your ranking. You are optimizing your search engine experience. The next terms that comes up are spiders and robots. Spiders and robots are parts of the search engine software that actually scour the internet reading web sites and collecting the data. These spiders go out and read websites looking for information that it can bring back to the main database (search engine) to be indexed. We want to make it easy for the spiders to find data to bring back to the main database so we’ll start with that. Read More…
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