Posted on May 13, 2011

What is a call to action?

Its all very well getting a ton of traffic to your web site but are your visitors doing what you want them to do, or quickly bouncing off your site? If you don’t have some serious “call to actions” in place chances, are they are wandering around aimlessly or worse still hitting that back button and leaving your website all together.

Simplistically, it is a set of actions you would like your users to carry out, for example signing up for a service, filling out a contact form or subscribing to a news letter. It gives your visitors focus and is a great way to measure how your site is performing.

Lets look at a couple of “call to actions” in operation.

The website for hardscapestl.com, an excellent resource for landscaping ideas and a fine oiled lead generation machine.

The home page offers a number of routes into the site depending on visitors needs but two recently added components are highlighted with splashes of red to create primary call to actions; register to win a gift card and Free download of patio plans.

The gift card call to action leads to a simple sign up form.

The Free patio plan button leads to this page which offers a number of plans to download with a call to action for each plan.

When the visitor has selected their plan they are taken to this page

and need to fill in a form to download their plan. The visitor gets a free plan and hardscapestl.com get an excellent qualified lead to follow up on.

A win win for both.

Does your website have call to actions?

Posted on April 25, 2011

Does your web designer do this?

Creating a great web site is only the start of an online presence for many business.

Does your web designer take care of:-

Domain name registration
Hosting
Email setup
Web Analytics – see how many hits your site is getting, where they are coming from, how long your visitors are staying etc.
Social Media Avenues – what is best for your business
Social Media Profiles, setting up Twitter, Facebook YouTube, Flikr …
Social Media Training
Search Engine Optimization
Getting your site listed and ranked in the search engines
Getting your site listed on local directories e.g Yelp
Email campaigns

If not then you are using the wrong web design company.

We take care of all the nuts and bolts to make your web presence work for you.

©: 2011 Chicago Web Designer

Posted on January 25, 2011

Business Owners, are you using Google Offers?

Moving my web design company to Chicago a few months ago has kick started a re-optimization of my web site to better serve my new Chicago location. I have also created my business profile in a number of local business directories such as Yelp and Merchant Circle to build a local reputation.

In my quest for relevant directories I came across Google Offers today, a FREE marketing tool which works in conjunction with Google maps. If you would like to take advantage of this, here is the Chicago web designer’s tip of the day.

List your business on Google Places using your Google account login information. Company name, address, telephone, email and category are required fields. Optional fields include hours of operation, photo upload e.g logo, description, and even a video upload.
Verify your business. This is easily done by an automated phone system – the quick way or via a PIN sent to the business address. Once verified your business will appear on Google maps.
On your main Google Places Dashboard click “Offers” and select +add new offer
Complete the offer form and hit submit.
Once your offer is live you can edit, pause or delete it.

Here is the offer I created today: Free website review

Enjoy!

Posted on December 3, 2010

Tips for using your Social Media Profiles for SEO

Do you have a Twiter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or any other social network profile? Are you getting the full SEO (search engine optimization) potential from these profiles? Here are a few tips to maximize the possibilities they offer.

Direct Links

On just about every social networking site, when setting up your profile you will have the opportunity to link to at least one external web site. Make sure you fill out those sections and test then once your profile is live. Links you may want to consider adding are your company web site, blog or links to your other social profiles.

Search Engine Page Results (SERP)
Building a robust profile and not just completing the “bare minimum” can really help dominate the search engine page results. The more information you can add to your profile the better, you are building authority. It is also important to not just build your profile but participate within the network too. Here is a simple example of a Google search on my name, the social networks dominate the return of the search.

Brand Awareness
Present yourself in a consistent way across all social media networks so there is no emotional disconnect for users visiting more than one of your social network profiles and getting confused brand message. Make sure your web site has links to all your social media platforms.

Drive Traffic
When participating in social media promote links in posts or tweets. The more useful the information you share the more others will re tweet or share which can build considerable traffic to targeted pages on your site.

Content
Delivery top quality content on your web site is so important for getting it to rank well in the search engines. Conversations, comments and ideas generated within your social media network can be great inspiration for blog posts or site content in general and help keep your content fresh and up to date.

©: 2010 Chicago Web Designer

Posted on October 22, 2010

A to Z of a Great Website

A is for Architecture
A great website starts out with a well thought out information architecture. This is best done with pencil and paper before a pixel ever hits the screen.

B is for Blogging
The benefits of blogging are many. A blog offers a great platform for quick updates, got a new product, won and award, got a great testimonial, blog about it. Interact and build relationships with your visitors through comments. What’s more the search engines love blogs, content is king and fresh content rules the roost.

C is for CMS
CMS stands for content management system and is an application which allows clients to update sites themselves. If you are looking to make regular updates to your site it is wise to have your site built on CMS application and this is something your web designer will need to know up front. There are many CMS systems out there, WordPress, Joomla, Dot Net Nuke, Drupal to name a few.

D is for Domain Name
Yourcompany.com, gone are the days when it was easy to get a domain name of your choosing as so many are already in use or have been “reserved”. Select your domain name carefully.

Pick one that is short and sweet
Get the .com version
Protect yourself, purchase the same domain name with additional extension such as .org, .net, .biz etc. the last thing you want is someone else using the same domain name for a similar business.
Try and get a domain name that includes one of your most important key words or phrases. This is what I have done with my Eye of the Chicago web designer blog http://www.ichicagowebdesigner.com

Don’t

Select a very long winded domain name
Use hyphens

E is for Email
Many times people visiting your web site are much more comfortable contacting via email than picking up the phone, so it is important to offer an easy to find contact email on a site. Don’t use a personal yourname@aol.com type email, it looks unprofessional. Make use of that carefully selected domain name, something generic like info@yourcompany.com work best.

F is for Facebook
Facebook has become a very popular platform for social networking. If it is a tool you intend to use as part of your marketing strategy make sure visitors to your site can connect to your Facebook profile directly from your site.

G is for Google
Lets face it Google is the mother of all search engines but Google offers a wealth of tools useful to both surfer and website owner alike. e.g Google Analytics is an excellent web statistics application which provides information of the number of visitors to your web site, which pages they are visiting, what key word or phrase they used to get there etc. All it requires is a small snippet of code added to a site.

H is for Hosting
Having a good reliable hosting company with which to host your site is crucial. The last thing you want is your site to be down because something has gone pear shaped at the hosting company. We are big fans of CrystalTech.

I is for Internet marketing
Internet marketing is the process of essentially “getting your site out there” and driving traffic to it. Listing it with the search engines, managing pay per click campaigns, email blast campaigns, setting up social networking profiles, advertising via banner ads. etc.

J is for Junk
It almost goes without saying that if you have a web site then you are going to get junk email. Spamming is a monumental pain in the rear end. However there are steps you can take to minimize its invasive nature.

Make sure your email account has a junk or spam folder. These can be easily set set up on at the webmail level and with careful filtering ( usually recommended by the web hosting company) a junk folder can filter out a large amount of spam. Do make sure you check it occasionally as sometimes genuine emails do get stuck there. To minimize this set up a trusted sender list so their emails will never go to the junk folder.
A lot of spammy junk can come through contact forms. If this is a problem on your site a CAPTCHA element and script can be added to verify the sender is a human and not a spam bot. A CAPTCHA element is a small image string you have to type in before submitting the form.

K is for Keywords
Key words or phrases are those words that you want to trigger the listing of your site within the search engines. To work best, key words will be woven into the code and within the copy of your site. Phrases work better than single words as words can be too generic and produce such an abundance of listed sites your site will be lost.

L is for Links
Got links? The more sites link to you the better your standing within the search engines, but they have to be quality links from reputable sites to count. One way to built quality links to your site is to comment on blogs with links to your products, services, relevant information. Don’t be spammy though or you are just wating your time.

M is for Metadata
Meta tags such as Title, content, keywords, description are included in the code of your site and can be used by the search engines when it comes to ranking your site. Google uses the title meta tag information to return results for a particular search.

N is for Navigation
The navigation for a web site should be intuitive and employ the “don’t make me think ” principle. Text navigation is much better that an image based navigation as the search engines can “read” it and it is easier to update.

O is for Optimizing
Search engine optimization is the art/science of tweaking a website to maximize it’s potential, generally in relation to key words and phrases. e.g if one of your key phrases is “coffee cup cakes” it is much better to name the file related to your product “coffee-cup-cakes.html” rather than just “cakes.html” The same principle applies to name image files.

P is for Passwords
Make sure you use good strong passwords to access anything you need to log in to. Add numbers, characters upper and lower case letters. Don’t use the same password for everything or anything obvious such as “password1”

Q is for quality
Quality counts, does the design of your web site look professional, is the copy well written and concise?

R is for RSS
Got a blog? then you have a RSS feed ( Really Simple Syndication) which enables your content to be easily distributed via blog readers such as Google reader or even delivered to readers via email. You can subscribe to this blog here .

S is for Search engines
The one we all know and love is of course Google , Yahoo and Bing are the other two biggies. It is important your site be listed with these three But there are plenty of other search engines out there and the more search engines with which your site is listed the better.

T is for Twitter
Twitter is a micro blogging platform and another great social networking application to add to your marketing mix. Use it to build relationships, interact with your site visitors, announce news, new blog posts etc. Twitter is free and your Twitter home page can be customized to match your brand image. Follow us on Twitter

U is for URL
URL or “Uniform Resource Locator” is the address of your web site on the world wide web e.g https://www.indigoimage.com/index.html

http://: type of file
domain name: location of the file’s web server is at indigoimage.com.
backslash,then file name /index.html

V is for Visitors
Your site needs to offer the best experience for your visitors as possible.

Is it compatible for all browsers and platforms?
Is it fast loading? – you have just a few seconds to make an impression or your visitors will be hitting that back button
Is it free of technical errors, broken links, missing images, scripts that don’t run?
Are there call to actions?

W is for Webmaster
A webmaster will help you manage your site to keep it at optimum performance and up to date.

X is for XML
OK X was a bit of a challenge for this list. XML is a Extensible Markup Language; a flexible text format for creating structured computer documents. We use XML on a regular basis for submitting sitemaps to Google.

Y is for Youtube
Video is a fabulous way to add an extra dimension to your marketing mix and while there are lots of video sharing sites out there the most popular is YouTube. You can set up your own channel ( follow us here) upload your videos and embed them within your site.

Z is for Zoe Feast
A great web site starts with a great website designer, contact me, Zoe Feast, to see how I can help you today.
Telephone: 847 607 8679

2010 © Chicago Web Designer

Posted on October 15, 2010

The Challenges of Writing a Business Blog

In a recent post ” Chicago Web Designer: The power of 10” I alluded to the fact I strive to write 10 blog posts a month. That really doesn’t seem that many but after writing for 5 years, read my first blog post here , keeping this live and interesting can be a challenge. Looking at my blog stats I am falling a just little short of my monthly goal!

So what are the main challenges of writing a business blog?

Fresh Content
I keep a running list of topics to write about which really helps the despair of sitting down to a white screen and drawing a blank. The nature of my business means it is important I keep abreast of all the latest technologies and how they can impact my clients, from design trends, coding languages, communication and marketing tools , where were Twitter and Facebook five years ago? This evolution of technology provides a good source of fresh content.
Finding Time
Sometimes, especially recently, following my move to Chicago, there are just not enough hours in the day to accomplish all I need to do. It is easy to let blogging to fall to the way side. However blogging is an important part of my internet marketing strategy so I make a concerted effort not to let things slip. Setting aside half an hour,after pressing emails have been dealt with, first thing in the morning works best for me.
Technicalities
It is important to select a blogging platform that can accommodate your requirements as you evolve. For my business it was important that all blog posts could be stored on our server rather than a third party server. I started off using Blogger but they moved away from the self hosted functionality earlier this year. I then transferred to WordPress which is a self hosted application.

How about you, what challenges do you face writing a business blog?

2010 © Chicago web designer

Posted on October 5, 2010

Video Internet Marketing: a New Service from Chicago web designer

Since moving to Chicago I have been busy networking and last week met with a very interesting local business that offers video production for the web. Adding a video element to an online marketing strategy can reap huge returns. While many samll business owners are eager to jump on the video bandwagon, once they have their video what do they do with it?

We now offer video internet marketing services and what better way to present them than a video!

Posted on September 14, 2010

Do you need a professional Web Designer?

Creating a web site must be easy, something you can do yourself over a weekend , right? Your nephew/cousin/admin assistant has just taken a six week class in web design at the local community college, are they now fully qualified to produce that highly polished web site for your small business?

In all likelihood if you take these routes you will end up with a sub standard web site which, at its worst, can be detrimental to your business. It’s much better to call in the pros but what are the advantages of hiring a professional web designer?

To put it simply they know what they are doing. Consider the following

Design

Creating the look and feel of a web site is not just a case of opening Photoshop and playing around with a few pixels. A web designer will understand how to engage your visitors, enable them to navigate effortlessly all this while considering the complexities of coding the design-what is and is not possible. How many pixels wide should the site be, what fonts are web safe, how should the files be saved, optimized for fast download. What are the latest design trends? What type of design will appeal to your end user. A web designer will be continually asking themselves questions as they design.

Coding

Coding involves rendering the design into a form that can be understood by web browsers. A professional web designer will be an expert in HTML and CSS and well versed in platform such as WordPress, content management systems -CMS ( e.g Joomla) and be able to work with any shopping cart e.g PDshop.net. They will constantly test the coding to iron out any bugs and make sure of cross browser compatibility. Your site will look good irrespective of what browser of platform you are viewing it on. They will also remain up to date with all advances in the coding arena so you know your site will not be using outdated techniques.

Launching

The nuts and bolts of making a web site live, registering a domain name, opening a hosting account, configuring email, stats packages. All bread and butter to a professional web designer.

Internet Marketing

Having a site which ranks well for particular key phrases is on the wish list of most, if not all clients. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first step to achieving that goal and this end game will have been in the forefront of the designers mind as early as the design phase of any project. From researching the best keyword phrases, to naming files to optimize the potential of those phrases. What’s considered white hat (best practices) and what not do ( black hat practices) Getting the site listed is the next step, whether through organic ranking or paid placements through advertisers like Google. If social networking is part of your marketing plan your designer will help you implement.

So which route to take, the DIY or the PRO approach?

I can guarantee by hiring a professional web designer you will end up with a far more effective web site.

Posted on August 31, 2010

Top 5 Reasons for Redesigning a website.

We hear ” I need my web site redesigned” quite a bit these days. While there are many reasons here are our top picks.

I need my website to look more professional.
Looks are everything and online you have just a few seconds to make that all important first impression. A well designed fast loading web site can do wonders to encapsulate your expertise and reach and engage your target audience.
We need our content reorganized.
If your site visitors are having click through page after page to get to the information they want, you are making then work too hard. A web site with intuitive navigation and well organized content = “a don’t make me think visitor”
My web site is not doing what I want it to do.
Whether you want your site to act as a lead generation tool, a portal of information, or a selling platform, it is important to guide or funnel the site visitors exactly where you want them to go via “call to actions”
I need to add some additional functionality
Want to add a blog, additional pages, links to your social media networks? A well thought out web site will always be able to accommodate additional functionality without a complete redesign but sometimes there comes a point when a redesign is the best options.
I want my site to perform better in the search engines.
The structure and design of a web site bears a huge relation on how well a site performs in the search engines and a skilled web designer will know how to optimize all elements that make up a web site, for best search engine results.

Now lets take a look at these in action with three before and after web redesign projects.

Peter Meder and Company

We addressed all 5 reasons in the redesign of a web site for Chicago headhunter, Peter Meder and Company. The new site has a much more professional look/feel and immediately imparts the nature of the business. Visitors have easy access to the current position searches which is a huge time saver for both client and job hunter.

Bear Essentials

Content reorganization was the main driver behind our redesign of the Bear Essentials web site. We produced a much more appealing user friendly site with clear call to actions.

Tiger Tables

A more professional look was the order of the day for our redesign of Tiger Tables with clear call to actions.

Do you have a web site that could do with a makeover? We’d love to have an opportunity to talk with you.

Call us at 847 607 8679

Your Creative Partner

A Chicago web and graphic design company

Category: Internet Marketing

What is a call to action?

Business Owners, are you using Google Offers?

The Challenges of Writing a Business Blog

Video Internet Marketing: a New Service from Chicago web designer

Do you need a professional Web Designer?

Top 5 Reasons for Redesigning a website.