Building A Business Website: Step 4
September 10, 2008
Step 4 in Building A Business Website:
Create a Website Strategy
Step 1 in Building A Business Website is to determine what you want your website to accomplish.
Step 2 in Building a Business Website is to perform a SWOT analysis. Identify your business’ strengths and weaknesses and determine if your website can help support your business where it is weak.
Step 3 in Building a Business Website is to know your audience. It’s essential to remember that you are not designing this website to please you. You’re designing your business website for your TARGET AUDIENCE.
Now, the fourth step in Building a Business Website is to create a Website Strategy.
In order to develop a website strategy you must first establish clear goals for your business website. Then, you need to establish how you’ll MEASURE your website performance. You’ll need to establish OBJECTIVES in order to measure your website success.
Objectives are the goals of the website while strategies are how you will meet your objectives. So, in order to create a website strategy, you must first set a measurable goal.
For example, if the goal (objective) of your website is to improve customer service, then you’ll need to find a way to MEASURE whether this objective is being accomplished. One way to MEASURE that stated objective is to monitor the number of customer support telephone calls. A reduction in phone calls with a corresponding increase in website traffic is a sign that the website is meeting the objective of improving customer service.
When you have established the objective and how you will measure whether or not those objectives are being met, you’ll then know which metrics to watch.
In the example above, if you didn’t know that the objective of the website was to improve customer service, then you wouldn’t know to monitor the volume of incoming calls for customer services. Without that important metric, you wouldn’t be able to determine whether or not the website was meeting its objective.
Creating a website strategy is simply how you’ll go about meeting the objective for the website. It’s amazing how EASY the whole website strategy discussion gets when you first establish an objective.
With an objective in hand, creating the strategy becomes the “easy” part of creating website success.
Building a Business Website: Step 3
September 8, 2008
Step 3 in Building A Business Website:
Know Your Audience
The first step to building a successful business website is to determine what you want your website to DO for your business.
The next step to building a successful business website is to perform a SWOT analysis of your business- including your competitors.
Now, we’re to what may be the hardest part of building a business website: Knowing Your Audience
This is your business website. You are not designing this website to please you. You’re not designing this website to please your spouse. You’re designing your business website for your TARGET AUDIENCE.
I once had a client who had previously hired a gifted web developer to create her original website. The original web developer correctly “nailed” this client’s personality and developed a site with the client in mind. The site was funky and fresh. I featured photos of the client in a very Audrey Hepburn type of attire/attitude. The colors were dark purple and orange and the art work was very hip and modern.
Unfortunately, this client was providing goods and services to individuals in the financial sector.
So, for the first six weeks after her website was launched, this client was happily cold calling prospective clients. She happily provided her URL for her website to those who showed and interest in her services - and when she did she noticed an alarming trend. When she gave her website address to prospective clients, she noticed that they suddenly refused to take her phone calls. At first she wasn’t alarmed, but when she quit giving her web address and landed a couple of clients, she contacted me in a panic.
We redesigned the site and toned down the “hip” vibe. The original web developer would have said the new site was “stuffy” and “boring”. We went from using purple and orange to navy blue and gray. She got new head shots and this time, she wore a suit and assumed a traditional “formal” pose.
The result was amazing. When she began giving the URL of her new website to prospective clients, she landed 10 of the next 12 prospects who visited her website.
This is an essential Web Site Success Story which clearly illustrates the “design your website with your audience in mind”.
You’re designing this website with your AUDIENCE in mind.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- WHO is coming to your site? (Current customers? Prospective customers?)
- WHY are they coming to your website?
- WHEN will they be coming? (Before the sale? After the sale?
- WHAT do they expect to find when they get to your website?
- HOW can you make your website easier for them to use?
The only perspective that is important when it comes to your website is your visitor’s perspective.
With this in mind, ask potential users to “test” your ideas for your website before you begin the work of development. A potential user’s opinion can offer valuable insight throughout the process.
By asking for your customer’s input, you’ll not only get a better idea of what you need to do to create a successful website for your business, but you’ll also be demonstrating your commitment to them, your customers.
Just be forewarned, you may not always LIKE what you hear. In my business, when I asked my clients how they wanted their website tutorials delivered, I had video in mind for the delivery. Creating an online video is faster and easier than creating a written version. Unfortunately, my clients overwhelmingly “voted” for a hard copy of the tutorials so they could print out the tutorial as they went through it.
It’s all about the customer. Make sure you design your business website with your customers needs in mind!
Building A Business Website: Step 2
September 4, 2008
Step 2 in Building A Business Website:
Performing a SWOT analysis
Once you’ve decided upon a GOAL for your website, (Step 1 in Building a Business Website), then it’s time to perform a little further analysis before you begin Business Website Design Preparation.
Prior to beginning the design process of your business website, it’s best to perform a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
- Strengths - this one is usually pretty easy for most entrepreneurs. Where is your business strong?
- Weaknesses - this one is usually more difficult for most entrepreneurs. We’d all like to think we don’t have any weaknesses, however it’s very possible that the website will be the “answer” to an identified weakness.
- Opportunities - we’ve all heard the saying about opportunity knocking. What opportunities are knocking on your business’ door? Can your website be the answer?
- Threats - did your competitors hear opportunity knocking before you did? Did they act more quickly? What threats to they pose?
If you have trouble making this analysis, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is number 1 in your industry? Number 2? Number 3?
- What are each of these competitors doing that you’re not?
Perhaps your competitors are providing free tools to prospective customers via their website. Maybe they’re offering discounts to customers via the web or they are offering better customer support as a result of their website.
Try to look BEYOND the visual impression your competitor’s website makes. A beautiful site which isn’t functional is NOT an asset. You’re asking these questions now so your website can be professional AND functional!
Finally, perform an in depth analysis of your competitors’ websites. See what content they’re providing. You’ll also want to look at which keywords they focus on and who’s linking to their site.
You might think you’re finished with your competitive analysis but you’re not because what if your competitor is in the middle of their own website re-design because the current version isn’t working for their business at all!
So, in order to tell if your primary analysis is a road map you should take (or a warning to the direction you don’t want to take) , take a look at their website via one of the “traffic spying” sites such as Compete and Alexa.
However, low traffic numbers may not mean an unsuccessful web site, so the best “test” of a competitor’s website is to create a free email account and contact your competitor via their website. How long does it take to get a reply? A reply that comes in within 24 hours means that your competitor is serious about their website. If a week or more has passed without a response, consider their website to be a WARNING to your business on how NOT to run a website.
Far too often, business owners play the “me too” game when developing their website. I once had a client who INSISTED upon copying a competitor’s site. Six weeks later, the competitor launched his new redesigned website. Turned out my client had unknowingly been emulating a website that wasn’t working for her competitor.
An essential key to website success is to rerform a SWOT analysis before you begin building your business website. It’s a key to creating a website strategy that works!
Installing Plug-ins to Improve Wordpress SEO:
September 2, 2008
In the first post of this series on How to Make your Own Website, we looked at the importance of choosing the right domain name.
In the second post of this series, we looked at how important it is to find a quality web host.
In the third post of this series, we looked at why your website should be a blog.
Then, we covered installation of Wordpress blogs on your own hosting provider.
Now, in this post, we’re going to share some of the best Plug-ins for Wordpress self hosted blogs.
Here’s the list of essential plus ins Acumen Web Services includes in their blog installation:
- Akismet
Protects you from spam comments. Requires you sign up with a separate account with Wordpress.com to activate, but it WELL worth the effort! - AskApache Password Protect
This plug in essential adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well. Imagine a HUGE brick wall protecting your frail .php scripts from the endless attacks of automated web robots and password-guessing exploit-serving virii. - Commentluv
Automatically grabs and displays a blog commenter’s most recent blog post. - Google (XML) Sitemap Automatic Generator
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Every time you make a blog post, this plug in automatically generates a new XML site map for your blog. Google was the first to “require” sitemaps for indexing and now Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc all use this format as well.It’s not enough to just post new keyword articles to your blog style website. You MUST have this plug-in uploaded and installed to enjoy the full power of a self hosted Wordpress blog. - No WWW
When you install Wordpress, it defaults to http://yoursitename.extension. Sometimes, people will type in a www in front and if they do that when they’re creating links to your blog, then the search engines won’t recognize them as the same as links without the www. - Post Keyword Research
This is a new essential!!! Allows you to easily do keyword research BEFORE you title that blog post! - Replace WP-Version
If a hacker tries to force his way into your Wordpress installation, one of the things he/she will need to know is what version of Wordpress your blog is running. If your blog is running 2.3.1 or earlier, it has a security hole that allows spammers to actually INJECT hidden code into your blog. This plug in hides that information. - Robots Meta
One of the files you need to chmod to 666 is the Robots.txt file. This plug in allows you to alter that file without using FTP. - Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
Protects your inbox from spammers using your contact form to contact you. - WordPress.com Stats
Since you already got your API from Wordpress.com, go ahead and install this plug in and use that API code here as well.
Building A Business Website: Step 1
September 2, 2008
Step 1 in Building A Business Website:
What do you want your website to accomplish?
One of the essential keys to web site success is determining what you want your website to DO for your business.
Many businesses, both big and small, begin the whole “website creation process” from the mindset of “We need a website - NOW!”
However, launching a website without thinking about why you need a website is a surefire way to waste time/energy and money.
- What’s the benefit of having a website for your business?
- What are your goals for the business?
- How can your website facilitate those business goals?
- What do you need your business’ website to do?
It’s important to remember that your website is not your business, it’s a TOOL for your business.
The first step in building a business website is to ask the question:
What do you want your website to accomplish?
It’s the old, “You’ve got to establish a destination so you know which road to take.” There are a lot of great reasons to have a website for your business, but paying for hosting and keeping a web developer in business are not amongst the good reasons to have a website.
Way, way, way too many business websites are launched without a goal or a plan. I actually got a web development job from a company whose sole reason for creating a website was so that vendors would do business with the company. Turns out that they were having trouble getting vendors to take them seriously as a small business. Many vendors in their industry wouldn’t establish and account with a business that didn’t already have a website. With that as a goal, it wasn’t hard to create a website which satisfied that goal.
Why does your business need a website? What do you want your business website to do? There are lots of functions a website can perform:
- Your business website can act as an easy way for prospective customers to find you.
- Your business website can act as a powerful customer service tool.
- Your business website can act as a powerful marketing tool.
- Your business website can act as a powerful communication tool.
However, your business website won’t act as ANY of these things if you don’t build it with a goal in mind.
One of the keys to web site success is Business Website Design Preparation. However, before you can begin design preparation, you must first establish a goal.
PICK ONE from the list above. Create a website which accomplishes that goal and then you’ll be ready to create the next generation website for your business (or another website) to accomplish a SECOND goal.
Turns out you build a website the same way you eat an elephant - one bite at a time!
How to Create a Simple Website
August 30, 2008
One of the most important keys to create a simple website is to recognize what you want your website to do for your business.
Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of business is not to make a sale, but to keep a customer. The properly developed web site is a killer application for not only getting new customers but keeping your current customers happy. The key is to develop a web site that focuses on the web’s primary strength which is communicating information.
Are you creating a website to capture a prospective customer’s attention before he/she makes a purchase? More and more, internet users are using the medium to do research online before making a purchase. In the case of appliance purchases, more than 80 percent of consumers go to the web first before making a purchase.
You website doesn’t have to be complex or complicated to help someone make a buying decision. As a matter of fact, simpler is better when it comes to creating a website.
A Wordpress self hosted blog is an easy, simply way to create an effective and successful website. These blogs can look more like websites than blogs by simply choosing the right “presentation”.
Domain Name’s Role in Website Success
August 18, 2008
Recently, I’ve been absolutely stunned at the importance of choosing the right domain name for a website. It’s not that you can’t overcome the choice of a poor domain name (such as Keys to Website Success) but choosing the right domain name certainly gives your fledgling website a giant step ahead of the rest of the game.
Choosing a domain name with the “right” keywords can literally be the difference between website success and website failure.
I installed a Wordpress self hosted blog for a client about 6 months ago. Like many of my clients, she had trouble getting “motivated” to post regularly to her blog. After 4 months, she had only posted 10 articles, many of those were poems. To say she wasn’t using frequently searched keywords in her posts would be an understatement.
When she asked me to look at her log files, I have to confess, I was expecting the worst. Her posts were erratic both in frequency and content. However, I was PLEASANTLY surprised when I ran a log file analysis. Despite her erratic posting, she was still getting several hundred visitors a day to her self hosted Wordpress blog. Digging deeper into the log files gave me the answer to the secret to her website success: she had registered the “right” keyword domain name.
By registering a domain name which contained the keyword string used by people to find her services, this client was enjoying an incredible level of website success! Website visitors were signing up for her newsletter and returning time and time again to read her blog.
So if there were one word of advice I would give someone looking to start their new website, it would be this: register the right domain name.
Finding the Right Keyword Domain Name
It’s really quite simple to find the right keyword domain name.
Begin by visiting the Google Adword Selector. Test your potential domain names here. Test various combinations. For example, the keywords “success factors” are searched, on average five times more than “success strategies”. So if you’re trying to decide between two domain names, one that includes the words “success factors” and one that includes “success strategies”, you’d be better off registering the first name over the second.
The internet is more than a decade old and great domain names that are available are hard to find. That’s why you need the following tools:
The Word Wizard allows you to combine your keywords with your location. Simply enter the word you want to optimize for, choose “before or after” and then pick if you want to combine that word with a US state or a major city. VIOLA! Localized search engine optimization magic!
On the other hand, maybe you don’t want to confine your self to a particular US location, then there’s another tool called the Domain Twist This domain name registration tool allows you to combine two different keywords into dozens of domain name possibilities. Sometimes, the addition of an e before a keyword combo is all you need to snatch up a great keyword specific domain name!
I had another client who set out to deliberately built a self hosted Wordpress blog using this strategy. Within 4 weeks, she found her blog at #4 in Google on her keyword. To say she’s ecstatic would be an understatement.
Search engines drive incredible amounts of traffic. Picking the right keyword domain name can help you to achieve website success - even if you’re doing everything else wrong (like the client first mentioned in this article)! However, when you do everything right (like the latter client) it can turn into real marketing magic for your website.
How to Create a Simple Website
July 22, 2008
You don’t want bells… you don’t want whistles. All you want is to create a simple website for your business. However, you probably want that website to be a success so here are some key elements to pay attention to as you create a simple website.
It sounds like a reasonable request, but creating a simple website is not a simple task.
First, you need a GREAT domain name for your simple website. I had a client who got great traffic to her blog-style website despite the fact that she rarely posted to her blog. The key to her success was the domain name she pointed to the website. Because the domain name contained the exact phrase people were using to find information like hers on the web, she got traffic to her site thanks to the search engines without doing anything other than register the right domain name.
Next, you need a reliable web hosting provider. Your web hosting provider is an important decision in the process of creating even a simple website.
Finally, even a simple website should still be a blog. Wordpress self hosted blogs are by far the most effective when it comes to creating a simple website that works for your business.
Finally, you’ll need a web marketing strategy that works. You need a simple website that can be found by the search engines but you also need one that is easily understood by the human visitors the search engines bring to your website.
Creating a simple website doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. If you need help with the process please feel free to contact us.
How to Make Your Own Website: Why Your Website Should Be a Blog
July 11, 2008
In Step One of how to make your own website, we discussed how important the right domain name is to your website success.
In Step Two we discussed how important your choice of web host is to your website success.
In this installment, we’ll discuss why your website should be a blog.
You’ve probably heard a lot about blogs and there is a lot of confusion out there over the differences between a “blog” and a “website”.
A blog IS a website. Blogs are simply the slang term given to a type of software which makes it easy for “regular” people to get information onto the internet.
Blogs are technically simply software programs known as Content Management Systems (CMS). A blog makes it easy to MANAGE the content of your website. The CONTENT of your website is going to ultimately determine its success.
In Website Success: A Strategy That Works one of the strategies to achieve website success is to properly code your website so it can be found by the search engines. Achieving this end is infinitely easier when you launch a self hosted Wordpress blog.
A self hosted Wordpress blog is the fastest, easiest way to achieve website success. If you’re not familiar with the intricacies of html and css, then don’t even try to make your own website. Using the “easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) html editors does not create code that is pretty or friendly to the search engines.
If you choose one of the hosts recommended previously, you can install Wordpress with a single click using Fantastico.
Learn more about choosing a theme for your self hosted Wordpress blog at Acumen Web Services.
How To Make Your Own Website: Finding a Web Host
July 9, 2008
In the last post, you learned how important your choice of domain name is for your website success. Now, Step Two in how to make your own website is to find a web host.
Think of your domain name as an address plaque which you can move from web host to web host. The essential things to look for in a web host are
- quality web hosting
- reliable web hosting
- cheap
Notice I didn’t say “free hosting”.
Finding quality, reliable hosting cheap is a tall order. The ranks of web hosts are filled with people who think web hosting is a way to “get rich quick”. In the beginning, it can appear like being a quality web host is easy. The equipment is new, the loads on the servers is light and in the beginning, the initial hosting clients are very tech savvy.
Then, comes the rush. Suddenly, your web host has to hire more staff. The server loads increase and suddenly, customer service and maintenance begin to rear their ugly heads.
Since your web host is the equivalent of your brick and mortar store’s physical building, your choice of web host is probably the most important decision you’ll make when it comes to your website. Your websites success literally depends upon your choice of web hosting company.
With that said, there are only TWO web hosts I can recommend from personal experience.
Last year, I burned through literally dozens of hosting companies and not one of them could provide anywhere near the service of the two hosts above.
Web hosting is all about reliability. Since no computer is perfect, the next thing to look for in a web host is the ability to connect with customer service quickly and efficiently. You don’t need to get a busy signal or a voice mail when your site is down.
The two web hosts above have provided quality service for me for the past 2 years and counting.
The next step in how to make your own website: Why your website should be a blog.
