It’s sometimes hard to know if it’s truly time to redesign your business website. The cost, in terms of time and budget, that must be devoted to a website redesign project has to be balanced against the potential gain from the new site. For some businesses, it might be better to balance the cost of a new website against the cost of keeping a poor performing website.

Here are a few things to consider when you’re weighing the cost versus the benefits of replacing your current business website.

Is the current website turning away potential customers?

One quick way to get the answer to this question is to conduct a brief online or email survey. Take a screenshot of your current home page. Give people the opportunity to rank your website homepage on a scale of 1-5 for whether it inspires trust, confidence, enjoyment or other feelings that would motivate someone to do business with your company. Sites like SurveyMonkey and UserTesting.com offer extremely inexpensive surveys and user testing that can quickly tell you if your current website is actually a business liability or asset. 

How difficult is it to update your current website?

The ability to refresh the content for your website internally, without having to call in a designer or developer, is something that can extend its value considerably. If your current website does not feature a content management system (CMS), then you may want to consider updating it. Especially for restaurants and businesses whose menu or services change frequently, the ability to update your site yourself can be a huge business advantage.

Have your business needs outgrown the current site?

Sometimes, your business model changes. Or you a new product or service set takes off in a big way. Sometimes, your business grows quickly, and your existing website is no longer an accurate reflection of who you are. If that’s the case, it may still be attracting visitors, but if they’re not the right visitors for where your business is now, it’s still not performing optimally.

Have competitors launched sites that are outperforming your current site in search?

Google has changed its algorithm considerably in the last five years to favor sites with frequently updated, fresh content and social integration. While your site may have established a lead in organic search upon launch, you may have found that competitors have surpassed you in recent years. If that’s the case, and organic or local search is relevant to your business, it may be time to update.

If all these factors are pointing to a decision to update or completely redesign your business website, we’d love to discuss it with you. 

In today’s world, you have two front doors:  the one to your physical office, and your “virtual” front door (i.e. your website) – which is probably the first contact they have with you.  More often than not, there’s a huge disconnect between the look and feel of the office, and the “virtual” front door presented on your website.

Your site should really compliment and re-enforce your brand and/or your other marketing tools.  Ask yourself an honest question, “Does my website fall flat?”  More to the point, “Based on this, would I hire me?” 

Your business environment is incredibly competitive, but have you really embraced effective marketing?  I don’t mean “advertising” in the traditional sense, rather “marketing” which is truly differentiating your company/practice from your competition.  That’s where your web presence can have an immediate, trackable impact.

Even if I get your name via a word-of-mouth referral, Google’s a verb.  I’m going to check you out (and probably several of your competitors).  Your site is a front door – an introduction to the business.  For those reasons, it needs to attract a prospective customer through testimonials (or case studies), good information presented in a simple layout, possibly a video about key personnel, and importantly, welcoming graphics that entice me to contact the office to schedule a consultation.

People love the Internet because it’s easy, it’s quick, and it enables them to size you up before they commit to contacting you.  So let me ask you again, based on your current website, would you hire you? If you’re not so sure, give us a call. We’d love to discuss some proven ways to correct that. 

There are a couple of reasons for that. One of which is an honest reason, and one of which should give you pause. The honest reason is, there is no secret sauce to doing internet marketing. There’s a wealth of resources out there on how to optimize your website to perform well in search. If you have the time, the basic intelligence and the willingness to learn and experiment, pretty much anyone can be successful in internet marketing.

The murkier reason is that there are some super sneaky things that you can do that will sometimes earn you big short term results, but which can also get your website penalized and labeled SPAM by Google. These “black hat” tactics are obviously questionable practices, even to a web layman. So their practictioners tend to talk in extremely vague terms. Either that, or they keep the level of explanation so technical that they believe clients won’t understand that they’re actually using code to hijack web surfers’ browsers, plant bogus links, etc.

At Makespace, we don’t have a problem with sharing our recipe for success, in as much or as little detail as our clients would prefer. That’s because he main ingredient is sweat. Creating beautiful, clean-coded sites with solid architecture and then keeping a steady stream of fresh, engaging and relevant content is a lot of hard work. Our clients recognize that just because they technically could do some of this work themselves, that doesn’t mean they should. Hiring us means they can focus on running their business, so the experience we’re helping to create on the web is just as solid as the one that happens in their place of business.

And that’s a recipe for success we actually hope gets copied by others.

Ossie Davis describes clothes to Tom Hanks in Joe vs. the Volcano from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.

There is a reason that branding is also known as “identity.”

Good branding is not coming up with nice packaging to wrap around a generic product. Good branding is uncovering the specific, true and delightful characteristics of a business, product or organization, and making sure your image clearly reflects those qualities.

A logo and a brand identity is like clothing for a business. Just as with people, if the clothes don’t really fit, it’s obvious. Like Ossie Davis’ character in the video clip, an agency can’t tell you who you are or who you should be.

What we can do is jump back in the seat with you, ask you good questions, and use your answers to tell us where to take you to find the right wardrobe for the destination you have in mind. 

Want to go for a ride and talk about it? Give us a call.

This is a crying shame, because your analytics can provide a wealth of information about not just how your website is performing, but how your target audience behaves and how effective your marketing efforts are at driving action.

In all likelihood, if you’re looking at your web analytics metrics at all, you’re glancing at the number of unique visitors to the site, total pageviews, and possibly (if you’re particularly savvy) the number of goal conversions completed. 

That’s useful over time for benchmarking, but sometimes you can gain terrific insights by comparing two different metrics against each other. Here are three simple examples.

• Searches for your business category vs. searches for your brand name. Do you want to know how well your brand advertising is doing at improving your name recognition? Then filter your search engine traffic by those who are typing your brand name from those who aren’t. Add that number to your direct traffic referrals, and you have a good gauge of brand lift. This is really helpful additional information when you’re doing a television or radio campaign designed to improve name recognition locally. Non-brand keyword traffic increases are a gauge of how well your SEO efforts are working. 
• Pages-per-visit and time-on-site vs. conversions. Is your content doing a good job of selling your services and products once your marketing gets a curious visitor to the website? Looking at your “engagement metrics” (PPV and TOS) to see if visitors are more likely to convert after spending more time with your content is a good indicator. 
• Social opt-ins vs. social referrals and reactions. If you’re doing social media marketing, you’re likely looking at subscriber numbers: page likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter and LinkedIn, subscribers on YouTube and your blog feed, etc. But building an audience that you can’t move to action is a fairly useless activity. What you really need to know is are these additional “eyeballs” translating to “feet”–are they going to your website and checking out your offers? Are they reacting, commenting and sharing your social content to their own networks? This is a more meaningful piece of information when valuating your social activity. 

Want to take a look at the new look of Makespace? Got some internet marketing and web design questions to start off the new year? 

Give us a yell. 

So it was exciting to see a recent Business First article listing the top 5 health and fitness clubs in Louisville, because 3 of them are locations for our client, the YMCA of Greater Louisville. We’re especially proud to have helped contribute to their success by creating a website that is a user-friendly tool for the Y and their members.

Want to learn more about that project? Then skip on over to the portfolio. 

Congratulations, YMCA of Greater Louisville!   

Today, I’d like to talk about something that’s more of a difference of between the two cultures, as opposed to two individual professionals. It impacts the entire web industry, and in this case, I think SEOs and internet marketers have a lot to learn from our colleagues in web design.

Over the years, the web design community has proven to be a place where someone with interest, aptitude and a good work ethic can find plenty of people to help them learn the nuts and bolts of how to do their job better. Want advice on how to add sophistication to your basic designs? There are a million inspiration sites out there, with prolific examples of designers and developers sharing best practices openly. Need some WordPress design help? If your question hasn’t already been asked and answered dozens of times, just ask—there are probably dozens of people who will be happy to answer it.

When you cross over to the “dark side” of SEO and internet marketing, it’s different. While there are a few genuinely inclusive, transparent and open communities in the internet marketing business, what you’re more likely to see is a lot of misinformation, misdirection, insult-hurling and general dirty tricks. Even among ethical “white hat” SEOs (SEOs who don’t engage in practices considered spamming by search engines), it’s not exactly a warm fuzzy circle of trust out there.

Both web design and development, and internet marketing and SEO are industries where you are more likely to be self-taught than to have pursued a formal education. And all things considered, even if you have a formal education in these things, what you can learn from someone’s actual practice is 100 times more valuable and up to date than what you learned in school.

So why do internet marketers and SEOs eat their young?

The prevailing wisdom is that among SEOs, business belongs to the firm or consultant with the most effective, up-to-date, and test-proven methodology. Internet marketers are much more dependent on technique as a point of differentiation. Design is subjective, and web designers understand that ultimately a client will choose another designer based on subtle aesthetic preferences between portfolios. So as a designer, providing help on technique doesn’t necessarily empower your competition to beat you if ultimately it will be individual style that wins or loses most clients.

Another clue lies where web design and SEO intersect: in the coding realm.

Good code will typically not earn you business, but bad code can lose it in a heartbeat. The robust, helpful and open community that exists among web developers isn’t an expression of kumbaya idealism; it makes practical business sense at both the individual and industry level.

Web developers never work in a vacuum. The reality is, at some point they will have to work on someone else’s code, and another developer will have to modify their code. Large projects often require large development teams, with different developers collaborating. Additionally, there is always a shortage of good qualified developers. Web programmers are much more likely to have their career negatively impacted by their employer’s inability to find enough good programmers than by a surplus or too much competition.So promoting consistent best practices across the industry is inarguably good for everyone. If I’m a coder, helping you be a better coder is far more likely to help than hurt me in both the long and short run.

In contrast, SEOs and internet marketers much more commonly work as individual consultants. Our work is much less likely to be handed off amicably to another SEO to take over. If I figure out a technique that works particularly well in a post-Panda environment, it’s a harder sell for me to give out those juicy details to the public in a forum or blog. Also, SEO is fundamentally tied to competition in a way that development is not. A web application that functions correctly is successful whether it performs better than other similar applications or not. Another word for SEO is “competitive webmastering” — you’re always being judged based on whether you’re beating the competition or not. It doesn’t behoove you to put information out there that could be used by that competition. 

That said, SEOs seem to have difficulty even coming to agreement online on fundamental basic good practices. We should be able to at least agree enough on the basics to give those trying to learn a clear starting place. Designers may differ on how to apply basic principles of good design, but they can generally cite those principles.

There’s also a deeply significant difference in perception from the outside. People who are not programmers or coders tend to automatically assume that most programmers and coders are at least competent and honest. SEO and internet marketing unfortunately has, at best, a shady past and reputation. Too many scams and scandals have left a bad taste for people to assume honesty and competency from SEOs and internet marketers.

Unfortunately, the cloak and dagger regarding our methodology does not help this image much when people start looking into the industry.

So what is the solution? Probably not something that will fit into a blog post. As with most big problems, first attitudes will have to shift, and then practices will need to shift to follow those attitudes.

We recently had a client come to us with an unusual request for a web design project. The project itself is fairly cool: an intranet that pushes alerts as SMS / text messages to members’ mobile phones. While that’s the kind of interesting and different project we like tackling, the unusual request was in the terms of payment: gold bouillon.

That’s right. As in “Fort Knox.” As in “shiny coins beloved by leprechauns everywhere.”

The customer was a non-profit organization, but our contact is an existing and trusted client of ours. Our intrepid business operations guys took a look at the value of the coins being offered, and felt like at the current value, it was a fair price for the project.

Plus, who gets to actually say their work is worth it’s weight in gold, literally?  

As you can see, Mark is quite pleased with the arrangement. And hey, if the economy gets any worse, this may end up being our preferred means of payment.

Information Architects & User Experience Designers use simple psychology to attempt to predict behavior. The idea is to present information to the user in a stream of consciousness sort of way. If we are giving users what they need before they even have to think about it, it puts them at ease and makes them more likely to take the next step. ie: buy a widget, add a friend, read more.

“For the most part, we create Web sites to get users to do something—for example, to make a purchase, donate to a cause, or sign up for our service. It is our expectation that users will make decisions about how to proceed. But are we designing for optimal decision making by users?”
-Colleen Roller, Decision Architecture: Helping Users make Better Decisions

Think about the last time you went grocery shopping. You were buying peanut butter…you walked a few steps after grabbing your crunchy Jif and you saw rows of jelly. “Oh yeah, I need jelly too!” This is a simple example of how the grocery store has tried to predict what you might need after you pick up your peanut butter.

Targeted ads work in much the same way. Have you ever been on facebook & seen an ad for something that is right up your alley? “How did they know I was into that?” Most folks put it together but if you haven’t already; it’s b/c you told them in your profile that you were really into running marathons so now Nike running shoes are being targeted to you. It’s simple but fabulously effective.

Place relevant ads in front of a targeted audience. Place obvious next steps in the path of the user.

What might make me feel better about making my purchase?
User Experience Designer: Place customer testimonials on page.
User: “This other guy that bought this same widget says this was the best purchase he’s made all year and he had really good customer service. It must be good.”

What might make me feel as though I need to make my purchase today?
User Experience Designer: Place inventory tracking on page. Place Free Shipping & Free Returns callout next to Add to Cart button.
User: “They only have 8 widgets left in stock. I’ve been wanting one of these…I better go ahead & get it.” or “They offer Free Shipping & Free Returns, that’s nice. So if it doesn’t work, I can send it back without a hassle or added expense.”

If I’m shopping for a widget, what might I want to look at next?
User Experience Designer: Place related products & accessories around current product.
User: “Oh look, there’s widget oil for my widget! I should probably go ahead & stock up on that while I’m here.”

A Happy Customer will buy more, recommend you to their friends & come back. A Frustrated User will leave and they’ll tell their friends about their bad experience.

A good user experience is essential to conversion. If you give users an excuse to leave your site whether it be because they are confused or because they don’t feel comfortable making the leap…they will leave every time. Frustrated people don’t buy widgets. The only products or services that can consistently sell with no user experience considerations are items that people can’t live without. And even then…these places probably won’t get repeat business…they’ll get one order and that user will find another solution next time. A good experience will also create loyal followers.

Of course I’m not talking about you…but people are, as a whole, lazy

Don’t make them think. Don’t stress them out. Make their experience smooth, painless & downright fun and you’ll have a customer for life. Bad or good you can bet they’ll post it on facebook, twitter, yelp & google plus before they step away from their desk. A well thought out user experience design can make sure you’re business is getting hype for the right reasons.