Two Decades of Web Design

April 18, 2011 By Teresa Leave a Comment

Web design is celebrating its 20 year anniversary. Tim Berners-Lee created the first website back in 1991. A year before that, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Web design has significantly advanced through the years – from its beginning with text-based sites to using tables, Flash, PHP, CSS, Javascript, XML, web 2.0 to now developing mobile sites that allow various formatting depending on the size of a screen.

I remember using FrontPage in the late 90s and Flash was going to be the “cool”, up-and-coming web feature. Today, having the ability to develop a website with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that has a web-based Content Management System (CMS) is nice. One doesn’t have to load development software onto their own computer if they don’t want.

Comprehensive Digital Strategy

The Web has always been a means for disseminating information, but the way that people use and get that information has vastly changed through the years. Today, with the rise of Social Media and mobile technology, businesses not only need an effective website, but they also need a comprehensive digital strategy.

As we look back and celebrate the tremendous growth of the Web, we must also look forward to the new opportunities that the Web will afford us.

Filed Under: Website Development

Customer Intelligence

April 14, 2011 By Teresa Leave a Comment

When you begin the process of developing a website, it is important to understand your target audience. Are you targeting businesses or consumers? What are their demographics? Once the website is launched, it is important to monitor visitor behavior – tweak the pages that need tweaking, add additional pages, test different landing pages.

Different customer groups will interact differently with your website; therefore, remember to keep your website fresh, update web pages, add different call to actions, and address customer pain points. This will increase customer engagement.

As we all know, the huge advantage of online marketing is its’ ability to track and monitor features that are working. Are the advertising campaigns that you are running actually driving the amount of traffic to your website that you anticipated? Once the potential customer arrives to your website, are you converting them – are they picking up the phone and calling you, filling out a form, taking the action step that you would like?

Website Analytics

Use online analytics to continually monitor your website. Analytics give great insight into customer behavior. Each piece of content read, pdf downloaded, image viewed, how much time a visitor stayed on a particular web page gives insight into customers attitudes and interests. Take advantage of the data and fine tune your website to improve your customers’ experience.

By using customer intelligence data to alter your website and provide your target market a great online experience, you are truly taking advantage of the power of the Web.

Filed Under: Website Development

We Recently Built a New Website, but Where’s our ROI?

November 4, 2010 By michiganseo Leave a Comment

Generate a Return on Your Investment with a Website This is a familiar refrain for all those who have spent considerable money and countless hours making their website "perfect." And it may seem perfect at first blush. Afterall, the website incorporates beautiful graphics, "cool" animation — and in terms of functionality, it does everything but clean the dishes. Unfortunately, however, the website has yet to deliver a single lead — much less a single sale.

A website in-and-of-itself — no matter how beautiful and regardless of the number of "bells and whistles" does not generate leads and conversions. A $500 website — or a $50,000 website — without a strategic digital marketing plan, will yield the same Return-on-Investment — ZERO. That can't be, you think. Let's do the math. ROI is defined as Margin / Investment. In both examples (because neither website generated $ sales) the numerator (margin) is $0. So, $0/$500 = 0 and $0 / $50,000 = 0. Now that's a sobering thought. But what can be done?

To generate sales, you first need traffic to your website. Shown below are some critical questions you need to ask yourself to see if you are taking full advantage of the various tools in your digital marketing toolbox to turn your website into one that generates a powerful ROI:

How are you currently promoting your website?
Do you have links to your website or email newsletter within your email signature?
Are you running targeted pay-per-click advertising with Google? What about Bing?
Do you have targeted landing pages when visitors click on your pay-per-click ads — or are you just directing them to your home page?
Are you consistently writing keyword-rich press releases, submitting them to Press Release sites and then directing these visitors back to your website?
Are you writing focused articles and submitting them to article directories?
Are you implementing link-building campaigns and using keyword-rich anchor text?
Are you submitting videos to video-sharing sites such as YouTube?
Are you engaging in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns with a qualified expert?
Are you consistently blogging and engaging with your prospects and clients? And directing traffic back to your website?
Have you claimed and optimized your local listing on Google, Yahoo! and Bing?
Are you leveraging and directing traffic back to your website from top social media portals such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube?

These are but a handful of considerations as it relates to driving traffic to your website. That's the first step. It's also not the last. Once they get to your website, you need to make sure that you have strategies in place to keep them there, and strategies that will get the online visitor to take the next step.

To be absolutely clear, a website in-and-of-itself, is not going to generate a powerful ROI. However, by implementing a comprehensive suite of digital marketing strategies your success will be that much more imminent.

Filed Under: Website Development Tagged With: Website ROI