Small Business Design Resources

Website Critique: Get paid to advertise on your car

The owner of www.cashURwheels.com created this website to be a marketplace where advertisers and business owners can connect with vehicle owners to display the ads on private vehicles. Below is a video website critique suggesting changes to make the website more user friendly for it’s target market.

Having a website that is organized well and that is geared towards it’s target market is what’s going to make a positive impact on the website users.  Below are some further explanations and examples of suggestions that I provide in the website critique video:

Homepage

• The homepage needs to explain to the user right away what the website is about in the most clear and concise form not necessarily in a paragraph form. Keep the homepage simple and to the point.

• Create prominent call-to-actions for your users so each user can clearly associate themselves with one of the categories that are on the website.

For example the image shown below from TradeorSwitch.com (future website) demonstrates the two types of categories that will be on their site: people to people and business to business.

• How this works or some sort of demo needs to be added to the homepage. This is a relatively new concept and users will want to know how it works, so give them what they want.

• Add a gallery section to the navigation or the sidebar.

Inner pages

• Move the ads to the side of the website to create more room for your content like you have on the homepage.

• Keep up with the blog. Adding articles to the blog on a consistent basis will bring in more traffic to the site via search engines and keep your site fresh.

Pricing page

• This page needs to be organized more clearly. The free plan is the same for all users so there’s no need to repeat it three times. Create a comparison chart that makes it easier to understand the options that you’re offering.

Here’s an example of a comparison chart from basecamphq.com.

More website critiques

Of course there are more things to dive deeply into making this site better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re viewing this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.

How To Determine Your Target Market

Figuring out how to market your small business website effectively is critical to the success of your business, especially if you are investing time and money in advertising. For example, you don’t want to target high-end luxury goods to low income people or low-end goods to people looking to buy the very best.

Understanding how your customers’ think and what their spending habits are, is one of the keys of successful marketing. This is true whether your business is a mom and pop store on the corner of town or a small business website with great potential for global appeal.

There are some basic questions you can ask yourself when directing a marketing campaign – or even when choosing what products to emphasize on your website. Who needs the product? Is it a niche product or one with global appeal? Are you trying to reach a specific age group, if so consider who else you might need to market to. For example, if you are marketing video games to children under the age of 18, your advertising needs to appeal to youth but also to parents. If you are marketing luxury goods to men who are likely to be married, you might also need to target their wives and so on.

Once you have identified your target audience you need to think how you are going to reach your audience from your small business website. What blogs might your audience be reading? What sites might they be going to where it is worth your while to spend money on advertising? If you are not sure, go to some sites and look for ads for similar products to yours. If you notice that several other websites with similar products are favoring particular methods of advertising – perhaps they’re on to something.

Don’t be afraid of exploring new technology. Viral videos are all the rage, mostly because they work. Explore places like YouTube, and Twitter, and look into using Yahoo and Google ads to see how you can improve traffic to your website. Don’t just create your own log-ins to these sites, but leave messages on other people’s sites – preferably sites that might be attracting the same kind of traffic as would like to see coming to your site – and don’t forget to leave your calling card – a link back to your website.

Because owners of small business websites are usually on a tight budget, don’t overextend the finances to invest in heavy advertising until you know it’s working. Once you know you are reaching the right audience, you will know when it’s time for a more committed investment. Remember to monitor your advertising sites and when you get traffic to your site, make yourself aware of where it’s coming from. There are many tools on the market that will help you analyze traffic and many of them come free. Ultimately who is coming to your site will drive your ongoing marketing strategy. You want to know who is buying and what they are buying. Statistics are vital for increasing performance. You need to know what is going on in order to leverage it or improve it.

And don’t give up, remember that with persistence comes learning and the more you learn the easier it becomes. If you are a new small business website owner, expect a learning curve and exercise patience until you start to see traffic, and do good research to find out what’s going on with your website.